


The Kingdom

by PrufrockianParalysis



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Also other feelings, But mostly fluff, F/F, Fluff, Humanstuck, Motherhood, NOT IN MY FOYER, Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-04-29
Updated: 2013-10-30
Packaged: 2017-12-09 21:32:13
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 20,884
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/778199
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PrufrockianParalysis/pseuds/PrufrockianParalysis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Rose and Kanaya want to get pregnant. They enlist Dave as a sperm donor. Commence nine months of family shenanigans, big and small.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> The title and all the poetry included in this chapter is from Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Childhood is the Kingdom where Nobody Dies" 
> 
> Some day I may actually format the pesterlog. Today is not that day. I apologize.

_The Kingdom_

_Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age_

_The child is grown, and puts away childish things._

_Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies._

 

-          “Childhood is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies” _,_ Edna St. Vincent Millay

 

You imagine it best to tackle the issue head-on.

You’ll be pragmatic.

You recall Marat being rather a fan of pragmatism.

Although he was stabbed in his bathtub, so perhaps soliciting validation through his ideology is a bit far-fetched.

You quickly silence your mentally masturbatory tangent and take a deep, slow breath through your nose. The air in your room is a bit hot and stale - dust motes swimming in the bloated afternoon sunlight and slopping through the closed windows. You consider getting up and letting some clean air through, but you know if you unglue yourself from your desk chair, you will find an excuse to leave the room (perhaps the guise of making tea), and then a reason to leave the house (perhaps you will be out of the nice Jasmine Green Blend you like so much, and will have to get more at the store), and then a reason to leave the country (perhaps the store will also be out, and you’ll decide it’s really best to procure the tea from its actual source. In China.) So you crack your neck until you hear onetwothreefour pops, roll your shoulders, and open up your Pesterchum window.

\--tentacleTherapist (TT) began pestering turntechGodhead (TG) at 4:43 PM--

TT: Hello.

TG: what do you want lalonde

TT: You know, some consider it appropriate to answer an innocuous salutation such as “Hello” with an equally non-threatening greeting. Take, for example, the hallowed and respectable “sup.”

TG: sorry man but you barely ever pester me anymore

TG: every time you do you want something its all

TG: dave help me move all my shit into kanayas place

TG: dave watch my four bazilliontrillionmillion cats and plants while i jet off to fukin cape town

TG: to buy some shitty lesbian paper jewelry and take a lot of pictures where my upper lip is really sweaty

TG: dave tell me im pretty

TG: i mean i just dont expect banal conversation from you anymore you know

TT: Well, assault on my jewelry taste and perspiration issues aside, I simply contacted you to chat. How are you?

TG: yeah yeah sure ever since you moved into the cat cave you dont have any time for your bro its cool i get it i dont need a conversational pity fuck rose

TT: …Cat cave?

TG: it was like

TG: a takeoff on the bat cave you know

TG: but cat cave because as previously mentioned you have a fucking plague of cats in that house dude

TG: also youre a lesbian so

TG: ha cats

TT: Ah. Of course.

TT: Ha. Cats.

TG: it wasnt one of my better ones i know dont kick a man while hes down

TG: anyway sorry for being hostile i guess i just

TG: i mean its good to hear from you or whatever

TG: whats going on

TT: Well, I may not have been entirely forthcoming with my motivation for pestering you. I do, actually, need a favor.

TT: By all means, commence your gloating in five…four…three…

TG: AH HA HA this is rich lalonde just rich

TG: of course you need something what is it do you want me to be the one to break to mom that you wont be home for christmas again because i swore never ever again after last year

TG: rose you don’t understand she cried for forty five minutes and then said she could probably put a wig on me so itd look like you were in some of the pictures

TG: and bro went along with it and then i was in a purple sweater with oranges stuffed down the front opening your gifts

TG: i am a grown ass man and i will be in therapy for the rest of my fuckin life i swear to god i wont do it ask bro

TT: I need your sperm.

TG: make bro do it or just call yourself why are you so

TG: wait what

\--tentacleTherapist (TT) ceased pestering turntechGodhead (TG) at 5:22 PM--

Without thinking, you slam the lid of your laptop shut. You smooth your hair back, slowly, with shaking hands, and endeavor to take even breaths through your mouth. Your lips stick together for a moment as you try to part them. You catch the hard glint of your eye in the full-length mirror across the room and quickly look away. There is no reason for this to be so hard. In Dave’s words, _you are a grown ass woman get your shit together jesus rollerblading christ –_

            You tap each of your fingers on your desk, a soothing metronome in alternating patters of three, and open your computer again, Dave’s text glows hot and confused back at you.

            --tentacleTherapist (TT) began pestering turntechGodhead (TG) at 5:25 PM—

TG: rose

TG: rose

TG: rose

TG: what the fuck

TT: I think my request was fairly straightforward.

TG: and i repeat what the fuck

TG: where did you even go

TT: Apologies, I was briefly called away from my computer.

TG: rose is this some kind of psychobabble conditioning bullshit

TG: like you figure if you ask me for something really ridiculous itll make the actual favor you ask for seem totally normal and easy

TG: you think ill just be all yeah sure

TG: and then all of a sudden bring on the wig and the oranges its time for the chamber of horrors strider edition

TG: no fucking thank you woman

TG: no fucking thank you

TT: Dave, please stop and think about this for a moment.

TG: no no no i dont want to think about my sister and my sperm at the same time thanks but no thanks 0/10 would not do again

TG: choo choo all aboard the incest train population you and not me i got off in tampa and im enjoying the sun and the threat of gator attacks thank you very much

TT: Dave.

TT: I want a child.

TT: We do.

TT: There? You’ve gotten it out of me. Are you proud?

TG: also how does kanaya feel about you asking your brother for his seminal

TG: oh

TT: Yeah.

TG: oh you guys want

TG: okay i get it now okay wow

TG: wait though that doesnt make sense because you still cant like have my baby

TG: itll be like some kind of crazy fish monster or whatever happens when you incest

TG: itll have like twelve toes or a funny shaped head or something at least

TT: You’re not thinking.

TG: yeah well its pretty hard to think when your sister up and asks you to stick your baby gravy in her

TT: Jesus Christ.

TT: Not in me, you dumbass.

TG: hey hurtful words

TG: oh shit kanaya

TG: i totally forgot about her

TT: Score one for Dave.

TG: shes not easy to forget or anything i just

TG: shut up

TT: Your secret is safe with me.

TT: But, in all honesty. I really do need this one favor.

TG: you want me to get kanaya pregnant

TT: That’s the idea.

TG: rose thats not like

TG: a favor

TG: thats like a commitment i really dont feel ready to be a dad dude

TG: rose you of all people should know that im kinda lacking in good parental role models over here

TG: dude id probably end up covering the thing in puppets for no discernible reason or

TT: It wouldn’t be your baby, Dave.

TT: It would be Kanaya’s and mine.

TT: Although, you would still have an important part in our baby’s life. You’d be an uncle, and you’re absolutely allowed to take on that particular role however you see fit.

TT: Including, but not limited to gratuitous puppetry.

TT: Although I happen to know another brother who might feel rather gypped upon the realization that you have taken over as “Baby’s First Puppeteer.”

TG: no fucking thank you

TG: although gratuitious puppetry is like the best band name ive ever heard

TG: but wait no no no no no

TG: youre totally serious right like you want me to do this

TT: Absolutely serious. Actually, when are you free? we’d like to start as soon as possible, I have no idea how many attempts this will require.

TG: are you saying you dont think im fertile enough rose

TG: because i assure you i am as potent as

TG: something really potent

TT: A stiff drink? Your breath following a garlicky meal? Perhaps even, as Stravinsky once said, love?

TG: yeah yeah sure pick one of those i do not actually give a fuck

TT: Love it is. And I’m glad to hear you have such grand faith in your fertility. That means less strain on all of us.

TT: Unless, of course, you’re particularly looking forward to orgasming for Kanaya?

TG: woah okay uh if thats how were doing it then thats cool

TG: as long as its cool with you guys i just want to help i guess

TT: I mean, this does promise to be rather fun for you, I think.

TG: man youre really blase about this arent you damn rose i knew you were cold but i didnt know you pissed liquid nitrogen

TT: Blasé? Are you suggesting I’m indifferent to the conception of a new human being? My own unborn child, no less?

TG: no no no i just you know

TG: whatever whatever if its cool with you its cool with me

TG: anyway when are we getting this show on the road sis

TT: Tomorrow would be fine, if you have the time.

TG: alright eager beaver dont give a man a little warning

TT: Right, because ejaculation takes so very much physical and mental preparation. It’s much like the Olympics. Or joining MENSA.

TG: whatever i can come over tomorrow morning just give me time to shave and stuff

TT: Why on Earth would you need to shave?

TG: i dont want to be scratchy plus ive heard lesbians arent like huge on the whole facial hair status

TT: Well, that’s…thoughtful, I suppose. But you really should be fine regardless. Kanaya and I really don’t mind.

TT: Just don’t masturbate, tonight. Or tomorrow morning in the shower. It’ll decrease your sperm count.

TG: ugh dont say masturbate ill have bad dreams

TT: Masturbate.

TG: ew no stop

TT: Well, if you’re as potent as you say you are, everything should be over very quickly, and you can masturbate in peace.

TG: hey it wont be over that quickly im not fifteen rose i have stamina

TT: Not necessary information, but thank you.

TG: and kanayas totally cool with this right

TT: Absolutely. She and I are 100% on board. I assure you.

TG: its not going to be like a mandatory sperm party right

TG: because i really dont need any more reasons for her to look at me funny

TG: she still gives me shifty eyes ever since the thing with the jellybeans and that squirrel

TT: Please don’t talk about the squirrel incident.

TG: i maintain that if you keep jellybeans readily available you shouldnt be mad when i use them to the fullest extent

TT: Well, after you finish ejaculating for us, you can have as many jellybeans as your little heart desires.

TG: dude why did you not say that in the first place couldve saved everyone a lot of angst there

TT: What on Earth was I thinking? I should have started off the bat with bribery.

TG: yup do you even know me at all

TG: alright so ill uh see you tomorrow then

TT: Indeed. Feel free to bring any materials or stimulants that’ll make the experience easier for you, if need be.

TG: okay back into weird territory im going now

TT: Bye Dave.

TT: And thanks.

TG: yeah sure no prob i guess

TG: happy to you know get some ladies pregnant

TG: and stuff

TG: okay bye

            --tentacleTherapist (TT) ceased pestering turntechGodhead (TG) at 6:27 PM--

            You can’t tell if you want to dance in ecstatic little circles or projectile vomit all over your own lap. Six of one, half dozen of the other. It’s almost six thirty, and Kanaya promised she’d be home early, tonight, to either celebrate the good news (in the case of Dave’s acceptance) or brainstorm new ideas (in the case of Dave hearing the request, setting himself on fire, and bunnyhopping into oblivion as the 1812 Overture blared merrily in the distance.) You figure now is as good a time as any to sneak a cigarette in the backyard. You feel guilty for smoking (you told Kanaya you quit years ago), but it’s an infrequent event, and – to be fair – she put you in a fairly stressful situation. Talking about seminal fluids with your neurotic twin was never on your bucket list, to say the very least. The first drag of your Spirit is a little harsh, but the smoke begins to settle with you, and the familiar warmth and weight maps through your chest – bringing with it an innate, almost unwarranted, sense of childhood comfort. The smell of fresh smoke and waning sunshine reminds you of summer nights beneath mosquito netting on your mother’s back porch, sandwiched between your brothers on one sweat-sticky mattress, too hot to sleep inside. Dirk would smoke and tell you bedtime stories as you rubbed your mosquito bitten legs against his in an attempt to keep him awake long enough for _just one more story, just one more –_

            You hear the car door slam shut out front and curse quietly, stubbing the last of your cigarette out in the weird vase Kanaya’s sister gave you two, last Christmas. It’s shaped like a malformed uterus, and is good for hiding things, because neither of you particularly like to look at it. You hop through the screen door and start the shower before Kanaya can come inside, hug you, and try to press her face into your way-too-smoky hair. Just as you step beneath the stream, you hear her call out, softly.

            “Rose, I’m home!”

You squirt a thick vein of shampoo into your hair and pretend not to hear her until her voice comes through the bathroom door, again, very soft.

            “Is everything okay…?”

            “Come in!” You yell over the stream, and there she is, fractured and wobbly through the mottled shower door and the steam. There’s your girl.

            You see her blurred outline sit on the toilet and fiddle with the hem of her shirt.

            “Did you talk to him?”

            You poke your head out the door and give her your biggest, shit-eating grin.

            “You’re going to be a mom, Miss Maryam.”

            You are not surprised when she pulls you into a ferocious kiss, gripping hard beneath your ear and sliding her tongue between your lips with no preamble, water dribbling down her chin and neck and the front of her blouse.

            That’s your girl.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Angst and shirt-removal occur. A foyer is forever sullied.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All poetry in this chapter is from Andrew Hudgins' "Blur."

“ _Storms of perfume lift from honeysuckle,_

_lilac, clover—and drift across the threshold,_

_outside reclaiming inside as its home._

_Warm days whirl in a bright unnumberable blur,_

_a cup—a grail brimmed with delirium_

_and humbling boredom both. I was a boy, I_

_thought I'd always be a boy, pell—mell,_

_mean, and gaily murderous one moment_

_as I decapitated daises with a stick,_

_then overcome with summer's opium,_

_numb—slumberous.”_

                                    - Andrew Hudgins, “Blur”

 

            _It’s so_ hot _for April_ , you think as you attempt to gracefully untangle yourself from Kanaya’s many errant limbs. You press a kiss to shy curve of her inner upper arm and she lets out an annoyed, congested gruntsnort before rolling away from you, legs snarling in the sheets. So much for romance.

            You consider stepping out for another cigarette, but upon further inspection of your alarm clock, decide against it. Kanaya’s body is taut and well tuned - she told you that, in high school, she rigorously conditioned herself to wake up at exactly five minutes of eight (you suspect this particular habituation was induced via Pavlovian measures. Your girlfriend’s not one to fuck around). And, lo, a woman of her word, she’s sprung bolt fucking upright – groggy, tousled, confused, and sometimes angry - at 7:55 AM every day you’ve had the grand pleasure of her company.

            It’s now 7:50, and you consider trying to fall back to sleep, but know it’ll be fruitless. Your sleep schedule is far less strict – lax enough to the point of nonexistence, actually. You spent much of the night awake, Kanaya’s head pillowed on your chest and your thoughts blurring warmly in and out of focus, like the sun behind closed eyelids. You must have drifted off around three or four AM, though, because you can feel the shrapnel of a bad dream knocking around in your head. You sit up, pop the joints in your neck onetwothreefour, and pad to the bathroom, scraping the corners of your mind for one or two concise images – something specific from your dream, something other than the bright, runny colors and inexplicable nausea it trailed in its foul wake. You’ve been having dreams about childhood, lately – well, ever since the decision to have a baby, because apparently even you are incapable of avoiding that cliché pitfall – but they’re usually innocuous.

You’re seven and hiding in the cool, damp sewer tunnel during a game of hide-and-seek – you feel the water slosh into your shoes and walk too far and suddenly everything is small and cold and you don’t know where you are until Dirk’s voice, metallic and far away, yells _“Rose?”_

Or you’re twelve and consciously decide not to chase after the ice cream truck, even though something deep and primal inside you tugs and _tugs_ when you hear the first chords from all the way down the street. Dirk immediately disappears from his place on the couch, shoving fistful after fistful of nickels into his pockets, Dave hesitates for a moment before following suit. You turn up the volume of your music and avoid eye contact. Dave brings you a popsicle shaped like Sonic the Hedgehog and the stick is still warm and sweaty from his palm.

Or you’re four at the aquarium and you and Dave stand, mesmerized, just outside the tunnel of fish. You two are so afraid your feet will break through the glass beneath you and you will be nibbled to death by tiny fish teeth, but Dirk insists that it’s safe. He runs from one side to the other – long, loping strides – and motions for you and Dave to meet him. You are the first to start running, and in your dreams you never stop, just run and run and run as the water lights a puzzle on your skin and your footfalls cease to make noise – as you exist in only a colorful vacuum – safe and excited – free, if only for a moment, from any real fear.

This dream is far less inclined to be caught, though, so you leave it be – at least for the moment – and concentrate on washing your hands, your face, brushing your teeth – little motions, little things that help you forget to be nervous. You were so hot, last night, that a thin line of sweat sealed your eyelids and left your eyes red and gummy, your nose clogged, and your lips swollen – not exactly, you think, in Vogue for a mid-morning rendezvous with your twin brother/sperm-donor. You’re half-finished digging the sharp little sweat crystals from the corners of your eyes when you hear a staccato snort and _thunk_ , followed by a small, sleepy “ _ooouch_.” Seven fifty-five. Your girlfriend awakes - not with much of a bang, but absolutely with a whimper.

By the time Dave actually shows up, utilizing his spare key instead of knocking like a normal human being, you and Kanaya have straightened every picture in the house, vacuumed each room – including the stairs – dusted behind, between, beneath and beside every object tastefully arranged on your mantle, and made up your bed, the guest bed, and the cat’s bed. Just as you decide to call Dave and make sure he hasn’t decided to change his name, steal a car, and move to Canada – you happen upon him loitering in your entranceway.

“ _Jesus_ Christ.” You visibly startle when you see him, your nerves crackling and snapping – fraying along with your patience. “You know,” you smooth your skirt and exhale a short breath, “it is customary in many cultures to announce your presence in someone’s house before entering – so as not to cause heart palpitations or unnecessary calls to the police.”

“Sorry.” He says, and shrugs, picking up the shapely vase you bought in Venice. You resist the urge to slap his hand away from it – Dave is the absolute worst about covering all your things with his grubby little fingerprints. Your house will be coated in a thin layer of Cheeto dust and self-aggrandizement for days after this visit, you just know it.

Dave looks a little…off, though. You understand that, given the current circumstances, he might be feeling somewhat self-conscious, but he looks like he might actually be sick. His skin is a bit sallow – not uncommon, he spends too much time indoors, these days – but he’s so pale that you can see the purplish edges of his scars shine bright and stark against his skin. You can map them like constellations, now – there’s the one beneath his ear from strifing with Dirk, and the jagged one from the fated coffee-table incident – bisecting his left eyebrow. He has a new little pock beneath his lip, too, and you don’t quite recognize it. You’ll ask Dirk later – he’ll know.

“Anyway,” You sigh and concede, “thanks. For coming, I mean. Literally and figuratively.” You raise your eyebrows at him and he cringes just a little. He really does seem weird, today.

“So. We should just do this?” He angles his head toward you, but you can tell – even through his shades – that he’s avoiding eye contact.

“Right here, right now, dear brother. Whenever you’re ready.”

Dave stands still for a very long moment, caught mid-breath, and you feel the air charge strangely as he slowly lifts his arms and…begins unbuttoning his shirt?

This, of course, is the moment Kanaya decides to join you, finally alerted to Dave’s presence in your home. She stops short at the end of the hallway, though – face melting from kind confusion to horror.

Dave gets through three buttons and begins on a fourth before you regain control of your vocal chords.

“…What are you _doing_?”

“You said right here right now, so I figured…” Dave tenses, fumbling his completely unsolicited shirt removal and accidentally ripping off a button. It pings against the wall and rolls to your feet.

You look at the button. And then at him. And then at the button. And then, again, at him.

“…Why would you need to take your _shirt_ off, Dave?”

His mouth hangs fleshy and open, you can see a gleam of saliva running across his lower lip. “I thought we were going to…you don’t want me to…I thought I was supposed to….stickitinyourgirlfriend.”

“What. What? _What_? No! Jesus, no! We wanted you to….just… _cum in a cup._ ” You can’t. You can’t even handle what this – what he – _UGH._ You flex your jaw onetwothreefour onetwothreefour and force a deep breath.            

“What the fuck, Dave?”

He raises his hands and takes a step back “I’m sorry, Jesus, I’m sorry! Maybe you shouldn’t have used so much…innuendo in your Pesterlog!”

“ _Innuendo?_ ”

“You just sounded like you wanted me to…I don’t know, I just don’t know, I’ll go – I’m leaving, I’m out of here like white on fucking toast. I’m going. I’m leaving. I’m….Jesus fuck. I’m leaving.”

Dave gathers his mostly unbuttoned Oxford across his chest like an embarrassed fucking schoolgirl and turns to open the door. This is when Kanaya finally decides to contribute.

“You thought you were going to have sex with me.” Her voice is hard and quiet. _Uh oh_.

She continues. “You thought you were going to have sex with me…in my foyer.”

Dave’s shoulders tighten beneath his shirt and he stands with his back to you – cemented unwittingly in place.

“ _YOU THOUGHT YOU WERE GOING TO HAVE SEX WITH ME IN MY GODDAMNED FOYER?!”_ Kanaya’s voice escalates _very quickly_ in pitch and volume. You would be surprised if people on the other side of town managed not to hear that.

“I’mgonnajustgo.” …And then he’s out the door, hop-running down the driveway with his arms crossed protectively across his pale, skinny, half-exposed chest.

Well. That went swimmingly.

When you turn to face Kanaya, she is vibrating ever so slightly, like an enraged tuning fork. You take a few steps toward her, prepared to enact immediate damage control. _Girlfriend Meltdown Code Pink: We’ve got a woman  promised a baby and instead greeted with the bare sternum of a socially retarded man-child. This is not a drill, I repeat, this is not a drill._

Kanaya’s breath is hot and fast, and you realize that now may not be the time for hugs.

You opt for the “soothing a frightened animal voice” instead. “We’ll…This is a minor setback. But we can handle it. We’re adults.”

“A minor setback.”

“A minor setback. We can find another donor…one who is slightly less likely to misinterpret my sarcasm.”

“We can find another donor.”

“Absolutely. I realize that we…probably don’t want Dave’s genes, anyway.” You’re lying, but now really isn’t the time for actual pragmatism. Now is the time to make sure none of your valuables end up smashed. Last time Kanaya was this angry, she punched a grown man in the face and then threatened to strangle him with a rope made, in equal parts, of his intestines and his blatant idiocy.

She was on her period and he insulted your shoes.

So, this is slightly worse.

There are way too many nice, fragile things in the foyer – so you try to _gently_ steer her toward the kitchen. Tea is relaxing. You’ll make tea. You rest a hand, feather-light, between her sharp shoulder blades and guide her to the breakfast nook. She sits, stiffly. Her hands are clenched. Her lips are white.

You busy yourself with the kettle until you hear her say something in a rough, timid voice.

“I’m sorry?” You turn to look at her, “I missed that – what did you say?”

“…I said I don’t want a different sperm donor.”

“Wait. What?” After all this, that can not possibly be her sentiment.

“I don’t want another sperm donor. I want Dave.” She doesn’t look at you, instead tracing a light finger over the wood-grain pattern on the tabletop.

“…You don’t even _like_ Dave.” You flick the burner on beneath the kettle and ease yourself into the seat opposite her – still keeping your motions slow and cautious.

“That’s not what it’s about,” she’s still not looking at you, “He’s your twin. He’s the closest thing to you. I want our baby to look like you. I want her or him to have your hands.”

“My hands?”

“You have nice hands. Soft hands.” She looks up at you and her eyes are a little gritty and red. “I want our baby to have your hands and your nose and your pretty little voice, and…” She clears her throat. “It has to be Dave. We decided it has to be Dave, and it’ll be Dave.”

“Well, I think he’ll be a little reluctant to –“

“ _Then get him back._ ” She hisses, the abandoned rage suddenly flaring back in full force.

_Oh, Merlin on a buttered biscuit._ You could fight this, but you’re too tired, too disappointed, too shriveled and used-up and wasted to start an argument right now.“I’ll…have a chat with Dirk. He’ll talk some sense into the kid.”

“Thank you.” Kanaya graces you with the sliver of a smile – the bare traces of a crescent moon in this darkness. “And, Rose?”

You meet her eyes. “Hm?”

“This time, tone down the innuendo. I _do_ have a reputation to uphold, you know.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU TO MY BEAUTIFUL BETA MISTCOVER WITHOUT WHOM HALF OF THIS SHIT WOULD NOT MAKE SENSE.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dirk and Rose attend an Al-Anon meeting. Emotional furniture is overturned.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poem from e.e. cummings' "anyone lived in a pretty how town".

_children guessed(but only a few_

_and down they forgot as up they grew_

_autumn winter spring summer)_

_that noone loved him more by more_

_when by now and tree by leaf_

_she laughed his joy she cried his grief_

_bird by snow and stir by still_

_anyone's any was all to her_

-          “anyone lived in a pretty how town”, e.e. cummings

 

Dirk picks you up way too early - as, apparently, your family has created some kind of elaborate game centered around how greatly they can inconvenience you in the shortest possible space of time. He also denies you the courtesy of actually _knocking_ on the door, instead sitting outside in his rustbucket and leaning hard on the horn – startling a flock of birds into a slick stain across the sky and undoubtedly offending _all_ your neighbors. You rush down the hall, pat your skirt pockets _keysphonelipstickokay_ , and choke on your _“Goodbye!”_ to a Kanaya who fell asleep upstairs in a sticky, tearstained ball around four, this afternoon, and hasn’t moved since. Upon exit, you make the conscious decision not to scurry down your driveway toward the truck, despite the fact that Dirk makes definite eye-contact with you, and decides to blare a tune faintly resembling Beethoven’s Fifth.

After you hoist yourself into Dirk’s monstrous, creaking death-trap, he – casual as anything – slides away from the curb and cruises down the block. You can feel the scalding depressions left in your back from the eyes of every single one of your neighbors _._ _Fucker._

“Your clock. It’s fast.” You tap a fingernail against the clock on his dashboard, reading 7:42 PM, ten minutes later than the actual time.

“Don’t touch it.” He flicks your hand away from the Clock Set button, eyes still on the road. You find it incredibly strange that, at five, he treated you like an adult. As an adult, he treats you like a five-year-old. You told him, once, that you blame this defect on his general inability to accept change – he ruffled your hair and told you to stop eating so much chocolate before bed. _Massive fucker._

“We’ll be obscenely early. And, much as I enjoy spending an obscene amount of time in a church basement eating stale cookies and re-hashing my latent issues with my mother while some man named Sketchball ogles my chest and a woman with a neck tattoo of a mermaid tries to _hold my hand_ , I actually have other problems to attend to.”

“This is why you need to attend Al-Anon meetings. You have a lot of anger. At least Sketchball admits he has a problem.”

He parks, and you get out of the car without saying anything. You’re really not in the mood to be here, tonight. Dirk started making you come to Al-Anon meetings with him about a year ago, regardless of the fact that, one, it’s pointless to attend a support group for families of alcoholics when the alcoholic herself isn’t seeking any form of support, and, two, Dave doesn’t have to fucking go. Upon hearing you make those points, Dirk replied _“Don’t be childish.”_ Because he’s a _fucking fucker._ You are just beginning to realize the great depth of your foul mood. You can almost feel the black burn of hateful toxicity streak through your veins. Dirk lengthens his strides to keep up with you, and you feel his hand hover just above the skin between your shoulder blades – the deliberate lack of contact actually more infuriating than actual touching would be. You quicken your pace, and he matches until you’re both speed walking down the long, red plush carpeted main corridor of the church to the basement stairs. Until, of course, you full-body slam into the youth minister.

_Oh, God damnit._

You rush though a litany of canned apologies as he attempts to right himself. Dirk offers him a hand and then, when the minister is again in his upright and locked position, presents you the same hand. You accept his help, but not without fixing him with the _You Will Pay_ smile. 

            When you finally reach the basement – carefully choosing the uncomfortable folding chair closest to the door – Dirk plops down next to you and lets out an exaggerated yawn.

            “You think I could do a minister?”

            Seriously? You pinch the bridge of your nose before you answer, stunting the beginnings of a foul headache.“ _A_ minister, or the minister I just…bumped into?”

            “The minister you just _ricocheted_ into. He wasn’t too hard on the eyes.”

            “He’s too young for you. And also a minister.”

            “Well, I slipped my phone number in his bible. So, we’ll see.”

            “…How did you – do you just keep cards with your number readily available all the time?”

            “Hasn’t failed me yet.” He smirks, and everyone finally shuffles away from the weak arrangement of watery coffee and off-brand cookies to their seats within the circle.

            The meeting is fairly typical – neither you nor Dirk share much of anything, but you prattle through the serenity prayer and try to listen to _another_ story of pathos and unruly drunkenness and…your mind strays to Kanaya curled too small in your too big bed, head tucked beneath one arm – plane crash position. You imagine her waking to the low hum of a dark house, trailing through the halls calling your name before realizing you’re gone, lying in the pile of unfolded laundry on the couch and falling into another fitful sleep, fists curled in one of your shirts.

            You move your left foot very, very slowly and kick Dirk’s ankle. His eyebrows furrow, but he doesn’t acknowledge you.

            “… _Dirk_ ” You whisper, trying to use as little of your mouth as possible, to avoid detection.

            You see his eyes cut toward you behind his sunglasses. “… _What?_ ” He hisses back.

            “ _Dirk, I need a favor._ ”

            “ _Can it wait?_ ”

            “ _Not really, no._ ”

            “ _Do you need me to drive you to the hospital?”_

“ _No._ ”

            “ _Then it can probably wait._ ”

            “ _Not really, no._ ”

            He doesn’t reply, so you kick him again. This time you strategize more, so your heel really digs into the vulnerable curve between ankle and foot. He sucks air between his teeth – quick and hard – and a few people from the circle finally catch on. Dirk continues to ignore you. Fine. Shock tactics it is.

            “ _I need you to ask Dave for his sperm._ ”

            With that, Dirk stands up quickly, metal chair screeching as it slides out from under him, and jerks his head toward the door before walking out. Leaving you to apologize to the group and hurry behind. _Unbelievable fucker._

            When you finally make it outside, he spins on a heel and you find your face almost smashed into his chest.

            “Sperm?”

            You sigh and move away from him, opting instead to lean against the wall of the church, pressing one feverish temple to the gritty coolness of the bricks. “Yeah.”

            “I assume this has less to do with incestuous intent, and more to do with you and Kanaya deciding to have a child?” He leans close next to you, and you can feel his breath ruffle through your hair.

            You close your eyes. “Yeah.”

            “Were you planning to tell me any time soon?”

            You sigh. “Eventually, yes. Do you have a cigarette?”

            He produces a new pack from his deep jeans pocket and snakes one out with slim fingered agility. “Does Kanaya know she’s having a child with someone who smokes?”

            “That’s not the conversation we’re having, right now.” You slide the cigarette between your lips before opening your palm to him, silently gesturing for a lighter. He, instead, roots around in his other pocket through what sounds like keys, change and bottlecaps, before procuring a pack of matches and striking one, cupping the flame gently in front of your face. It’s always so surprising to you – his capacity for tenderness. The way it presents itself at unbelievable moments and vanishes as quickly as it appears. Like catching a lightning bug in your hand, only to find nothing upon opening your fingers, again – the glow extinguished, the night dark and oppressive around you.

            And the night is so dark; you can only see Dirk illuminated in the cherry of his own cigarette, red and alien across his sharp features. “Alright.” He takes a deep breath, “Have you asked Dave yourself?”

            “Yeah…” You pause, considering your options, here “He…” Better not to humiliate him, just yet. Dirk will lord this over his poor head for the duration of his existence. You decide to keep it, for now – if for no other reason than excellent future blackmail material. “He…lost his nerve.”

            “Well. That’s not too surprising.” He takes an unbearably long drag of his gross Spirit Black, and blows the smoke right into your face. You vow that next time you visit his apartment you will _pee on everything he owns._

            “Don’t make me ask.” You can feel the uncertainty in your voice tremble through the air, and you hate yourself for it.

            “I’ll talk to him. And stop interrupting my Al-Anon meetings, a’ight?”

            “….A’ight.” Against your best wishes, you feel a smirk edge its way into your deadpan.

            Dirk takes you home and you find yourself lulled into a strange sense of security by the cough of the exhaust and the jarring rattle of the windows. It reminds you strangely of your childhood. Falling asleep on the bench seat with your head pressed hard against Dirk’s thigh and your feet flat on the door, the bright slices of light against your closed eyelids as you drove under streetlamp after streetlamp. You hope your child has memories like these, too. You hope they’re better. You’d kick yourself for being such a sentimental piece of shit, but you can feel a painful heat radiating inside your chest and behind your eyes and you think that if you chastise yourself anymore tonight you’ll end up crying, which…is just something that can not happen.

            “Go home, kid.” Dirk says, upon pulling up in your driveway. “I’d tell you to tell your girlfriend I say hi, but…she’s not too big of a fan ever since that squirrel thing.”

            You roll your eyes. “You’ll talk to Dave?”

            “I said I would. Now get out of my car.” He kind of half-punches you on the shoulder and you…you’re just going to take that as affection, for now.

            “He’ll be over at eight tomorrow!” He yells out the window after your retreating back. You don’t know how he knows this, but tonight – you suppose – is as good as any to have a little faith in your big brother.

            You climb the stairs slowly, when you get inside – careful to keep your footsteps light, even though you know if Kanaya’s asleep, it’s hardly likely that she’ll wake up. But you want to preserve the sweet, thick silence of the air. The soft stasis of your home. Kanaya is asleep on her side, forehead shiny with a sheen of sweat, hair clinging and curling around her ears, framing her sharp cheekbones. You want to wake her – to tell her it’s all okay, but…but Dirk has a way of overturning all the emotional furniture in every room of yours he enters, and all you really want is to bury your face in the salty curve of Kanaya’s shoulder and fall, fall, fall to sleep.

            So you do.  


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Insemination, shower socks and all these goddamned pancakes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PrufrockianParalysis: Poetry is from Sarah Vap’s “Solar System Bedsheets” I’m out of town, so thanks to my beta MistCover for reading and posting! 
> 
> MistCover: If you have compliments/questions/ect for the author or myself, please feel free to contact her through me at grimdarkthroes.tumblr.com!! I will relay any messages to her while she is away.
> 
> Also, please note The Kingdom is now a collection on AO3!!! You can view it at archiveofourown.org/collections/TheKingdomAU and maybe even add your own lil' story to this crazy AU! Character information needed for sidefics available on request.
> 
> -End shameless self promotion-
> 
> I hope you enjoy reading!

_There, behind sunlight,_

 

_is the long pressure_

_of a child's love. Becoming mute_

 

_with the child's love. Long influence of stars touched_

_by the hand wrapped, asleep,_

 

_in the newly laundered sheets. Touched_

_to widths of butterscotch_

_stretched. Split-apart as the voices, rain thickening,_

_against one another forever, if glass. Forever_

_if resting against one another. Forever if holding the end of a year like this: the nights_

_lengthening. I check:        each child_

_is alive in his sleep. You are also asleep, love,_

_at the end of the yarn_

_you are weaving around the edge of a pink paper heart_

_fattening—quieter, now.        Forever, if quieter, now._

_-“Solar System Bedsheets”, Sarah Vap_

       The alarm on your phone wakes you at five-thirty, blaring some kind of very unpleasant and discordant rap/salsa jingle. After groping at your bedside table, effectively knocking three or four books and a tiny Anubis statue wearing sunglasses (an inexplicable present from your mother), you realize that your phone is still in your skirt pocket from last night, and gracelessly tuck and roll from your bed on to the floor, where you scrabble around on all fours, trying to silence the fucking music before it wakes Kanaya and she strangles you with a pair of pantyhose. You finally procure the offending object, and unlock it to find an alert message pop up.

       “Time 2 get preggz, yo.”

       If you were a different person, you might sit back on your knees, raise your fist heavenward, and yell a loud “DIIIIIIIIIRK!” to an unsuspecting and unfeeling God.

       Fortunately, you have a sliver more of self control.

       Instead, you plan to spend the next three or four months staging creative murder replicas using his Smuppets and mailing him pictures and corresponding ransom notes.

       You figure that if you’re up, you’re up, and start the process of getting dressed in the dark. (Ever since you began living with Kanaya, you got used to doing a lot of your morning ritual in total darkness. The few times she’s been out of the house, staying over with her family, you’ve actually continued to dress silently, without light. The idea of flipping on a lamp twisted something right, smack in the middle of your chest and held it there, constricting your breath and licking heat up into your throat. You may have some slight separation anxiety issues.)

       You dress, casual but nice enough to make Dave feel uncomfortable about whatever he’s wearing (you’re not above punishing him a _little_ more for his idiocy), and pad down the stairs to the kitchen, where you open the curtains and make tea in the window’s slice of weak, grey morning light. You make Kanaya’s favorite strong, spicy black tea in the thick green mug she likes the most. She never uses the handle – instead holds it between both of her cupped hands and against her chest before drinking, seeping up all the warmth she can. You pull out an Earl Grey teabag for yourself, as you never particularly adjusted to the deep Iranian tea Kanaya’s been drinking since childhood – the dark liquid seems so deeply mired in history that you’re afraid, in many ways, to broach it, for fear of culturally appropriating. You leave the spice and the steam to Kanaya, allow her to seep up her roots in whatever way she sees fit. You find yourself smiling, taking the stairs two at a time with her mug and yours cradled in the crook of your arm. She will not like being woken at this hour, but in light of the good news, you think she might refrain from enacting any bodily harm and/or cursing half to three quarters of your ancestors.

       You are mistaken. You run the back of your hand gently across Kanaya’s face, leaning down to nuzzle in her ear and whisper “Good morning, beautiful. I have tea and good news.”

       She thanks you by growling, turning, and pushing your face back with an entire, splayed palm. “ _Get off me, kafir_.” She hisses before pulling all the blankets around her face and curling into an angry little Kanaya burrito.

       Well, that was successful.

       You decide that, with that attitude, it might be best she wakes at her normal time. You can stall Dave while she gets ready, if need be.

       And stall Dave is exactly what you do. He shows up at eight, on the dot, five minutes after Kanaya slipped into the shower (too quickly for you to get a chance to break the news to her), looking chided, miserable, and smelling strongly of pancakes.

       “Hey.”

       “Hello, Dave. Fancy meeting you here.” He barely masks a scowl, and you notice the familiar whine of Dirk’s truck. When you lean to peer around Dave’s stiff shoulder, sure enough, Dirk is idling at the curb, staring directly at your door. You shoot him a smirk and receive an upward head-jerk in return.

       You usher Dave inside, and he glances around your foyer, clearly experiencing some minor to moderate PTSD symptoms from his previous encounter with your entryway.

       “You have a chauffeur.” You can’t help but smile, again. Dave takes an unbelievably long, deep breath through his nose.

       “He woke me at five, sat outside the bathroom to make sure I didn’t jerk in the shower, made me like eight hundred pancakes and pushed me to the car, and then up to your doorway. He’s like a one-man secret service detail backslash gay, sword-wielding Mary Poppins.”

       You steer him to the kitchen, away from the scene of the unsolicited-sex scandal. “That may actually be the most accurate description of our brother I’ve ever heard.”

       “Yeah, I spent all morning thinking about it when I wasn’t being force-fed carbohydrates or instructed not to touch myself.”

       You snicker, turning to start the water for tea, again. You pull down the custom Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff mug that Kanaya likes to hide behind all your other mugs, and line it up neatly next to your own. “Coffee? Tea? The tears of your enemies?” You turn to him and he glances up at you, fidgety and nervous, again.

       “You can cut the creepy Stepford Wife routine, Rose. I honestly just want to get this over and done with and out of me.”

       “Eager beaver.” You move to sit across from him, tapping your fingers on the table – _onetwothreefour, fourthreetwoone_ – “Well, I hope you realize that this may not be done for quite a while. These things hardly ever take the first time, you know.”

       Dave huffs a breath through puffed cheeks and leans back , far, in your chair. You’re about to tell him that he’ll leave scuff marks, but he beats you to the punch by toppling backwards, clattering to the floor in a flurry of flailing limbs.

       “Jesus, Dave!” You are halfway out of your chair to help him up, before you catch a glimpse of Kanaya in your peripheral vision – standing, shell shocked, in the doorway behind you, a towel wrapped around her head, and…shower socks. And nothing else.

       In retrospect, you probably should have tried a little harder to wake her and let her know that Dave would be here. Dave, of course, is still on the floor, shielding his eyes and spewing a non-stop litany of alternating complaints, excuses and apologies.

       “Holy shitufucking Jesus in a pink, sparkly swaddling cloth is it literally impossible for me to come to your house without being assaulted by a humiliation parade. Next time, in Rose’s House: Watch Dave be showered with a barrage of baby pictures while a hired troupe of interpretive dancers re-enacts every embarrassing moment of his life in a stunning, emotional display of Fuck This.”

       Kanaya, at this point, has absconded upstairs, and you honestly don’t know which fire to put out, first. You figure that, in the long run, the sperm is the most important part of today.

       You walk over to stand by Dave, nudging him with a pointed toe. “Well, I think now is a time as appropriate as any for you to ejaculate into a tiny cup.”

       He removes his arm from over his eyes and looks up at you with the most long-suffering glare you have ever seen in your entire life.

       “I regret every decision I have ever made.”

       “That’s the spirit.” You offer him a hand, “Up and at ‘em.”

       You hand Dave the specimen-sample cup and lead him to the bathroom. Once you hear the lock click, you slide down the white wood of the door – deciding that perhaps Dirk’s Security Guard approach isn’t a terrible one. You keep an ear out for Kanaya’s footsteps upstairs – they sound fairly regulated, so you leave her be. It’s probably for the best that she processes this alone.

       You slip farther down the door to lie with your face against the strawberry-blond hardwood, exhausted from your unnecessary wake-up call. The floor is smooth and cool beneath your face and you find your vision blurring warmly, the buttery strip of light beneath the bathroom door flickering in and out of focus.

       Until, of course, the light flicks out. “You okay in there?” You ask Dave.

       “Fine, thanks. Your house is just brighter than the inside of the sun. Thought I’d give myself a freaking break. Also, why are you still outside the door?”

       “So you can’t bolt.” You sit up, again, stretching your back. “Did you take your drops, this morning?” Everyone in your family presents signs of ocular albinism, but Dave’s is easily the worst. This results in family reunions often happening not over Fourth of July, nor at Thanksgiving, but, instead, at the optometrist. You have a photo stashed; face down, in the upper right-hand drawer of your dresser. It is of you, Dave and Dirk at the beach as children. Each of you has freckled shoulders and eyes squinted against the waning evening sun, Dirk is mid-sentence, face screwed up in concentration, and your mother’s finger is partially obscuring the lens, the texture of her acrylic nail the main focal point of the picture. Your favorite part, though, is Dave – small and light and, you’ve always thought, ethereal – covering his eyes with slotted fingers. He spent the whole day telling you that he had sand in them, felt gritty, hot blindness streak behind his eyelids. He couldn’t see well for three days, after, and that’s when your mother finally realized that it might be wise to make him wear his sun-goggles more often.

       “Didn’t have time. Also, can you not be right outside the door?”

       “My drops are in the medicine cabinet, if you want.”

       “I don’t want you use your crusty-ass drops, Rose.”

       You roll your eyes. “Fine, fine. Just…go on your merry way. Need anything?”

       “No fucking thank you.”

       You stay outside the door but try to keep quiet. You can’t hear Dave make any noise, and wonder if he’s even actually trying. That worry is quickly quelled, though, when you remember that he shared a room with you for eighteen years and you never heard him getting off. Well, if for nothing else, he can thank you for making him into the masturbation ninja he is, today.

       You sit. And sit. And check your phone. And check your nails. And sit.

       “…Did you watch ‘Breaking Bad’, last night?” You eventually ask, just to make sure he isn’t dead.

       “AAAAUGH, BONER KILLED.” He yells, “CAN NOT WHACK IT WHILE TALKING TO SISTER ABOUT ‘BREAKING BAD.’” “Okay, okay, okay. I’ll be quiet.” You huff out a little sigh and pack it in for the long haul.

       It takes far longer than you think was probably necessary, but Dave eventually emerges from the bathroom like the prodigal fucking son he is, holding the sample cup with two fingers and an outstretched arm, like it’s some leaking creature he found on the side of the road.

       “See? That wasn’t so hard,” You take the cup from him and wince, just a little, because it’s still warm in your hand. Ugh, brother semen.

       He shrugs and adjusts his shades. The light really is bothering his eyes, today, you can tell. You can see the bare traces of squint lines peeking from the corners of his aviators. “Go home,” You pat him on the shoulder, “Take your drops. Go back to bed. And…thank you.”

       He shakes his head. “Yeah, whatever. Say sorry to Kanaya again, for me. Tell her I totally didn’t see her weirdly small nipples.”

       You smack him upside the head. “Be gone.” You smile a little, “But, seriously, tha-“

       “Yeah, I get it, I get it,” He makes his way out, holding his hands above his head. “Don’t thank me twice in one day, though, hell might freeze over.”

       And he’s gone. And you’ve got a cup full of semen. Cool.

       You run to the kitchen, quickly, as you only have so much time before the sperm stop being..swimmy. You pick up the needleless-syringe from its special space on your counter and hurry upstairs, making a quick stop to the linen closet for some towels.

       You find Kanaya upstairs, already in position.

       “I hope you mind that I didn’t come down, again. I think both Dave and I have seen enough of each other for…a while.”

       You hold in a snort. “So. Um. I got it.” You hold up the cup and do some weak spirit fingers to accentuate how ridiculous this moment is.

       “So I gathered.” She smirks. She already has her legs propped up on pillows, and is looking at you from the bed, propped up on her elbows. “I thought I should get ready. Disclaimer: I feel ridiculous.”

       “Well,” You smile, “I think you look lovely.” You bite open the packaging on the syringe, uncap the cup and suck up as much of eau-de-Dave as you can. “…Ready?”

       Kanaya nods and lies back. “Forgive me if I don’t care to make eye contact. I don’t particularly want to observe you penetrating me with your brother’s seminal fluid while I look like a crab person.” She wiggles her elevated toes and you stifle a giggle and lean over to kiss her ankle.

       You insert a long, thin length of plastic tubing into the head of the syringe, and insert it as far inside of her as it’ll go, the cervix being the intended target, and she releases a long, deep breath as you push the stopper up. “Okay?”

       “Mmmhm. Weird. But. Yes.” You can hear her sucking on her teeth – a nervous tick of hers that puffs out her upper lip and makes her look like a mentally challenged horse. You love it.

       You carefully remove the syringe from her, and give a gentle nip to the inside of her thigh, for good measure. She swats at your head, and you look up at her and smile.

       “Alright. At least thirty minutes, you have to stay like this.” You try to muffle a laugh, but he face suggests that she is hardly in the mood for even your stunted amusement at her current situation.

       “…Shall I read you some poetry, my love?” You purse your lips, again, really trying to contain your hysteria. But, honestly, she looks like a flipped armadillo.

       “I know where you sleep.” Kanaya’s mouth twitches, but she hides it by pulling you down for a long, hard kiss, nipping and swiping her tongue against your lower lip to pull you in closer.

       “Now be quiet while I try to conceive this infant.”


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which there is vomiting, over enthusiastic sea-lion syndrome, and a very sexy cable guy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> PrufrockianParalysis: Poetry is from January Gill O’Neil’s “early memory.” Thanks, again to MistCover for posting and reading and not throwing me off a building when I didn’t do what I said I’d do. 
> 
> MistCover: Hello hi again!!!!! PP is still out of town, which means no one knows when the next update will be, after this one. Expect 2 weeks of waiting. Possibly less if we're lucky and clap our hands and shout "I DO BELIEVE IN ROSEMARY! I DO! I DO!" but then again, WHO KNOWS. If you have words for the author, please contact me at grimdarkthroes.tumblr.com and I will pass them along ASAP. Thank you for your patience with our crazy lil' AU.

_I remember picking up a fistful of sand,_

_smooth crystals, like hourglass sand_

_and throwing it into the eyes of a boy. Johnny_

_or Danny or Kevin—he was not important._

_I was five and I knew he would cry._

       - “Early Memory”, January Gill O’Neil

 

 

       A week or so, post crab-person-sperm-insertion (what you’ve, admittedly flippantly, started calling the insemination in your head), Kanaya sits across from you at the breakfast table, clicking her tongue absently as she works on the Sunday crossword with a sharp, purple fountain pen. You eat your oatmeal and skim through your slim volume of Sylvia Plath’s _Ariel_ , not particularly focusing on the familiar words, but finding comfort in the book’s soft, dusty smell, the worn corners and dog-eared pages. Your relationship with Kanaya, you often think, is quite similar to your relationship with a favorite book. You’ve read her over so many times, traced the web of her veins and the nicks and scars along her fingers, memorized the rise and fall of her facial expressions, the graceful slip from sentimentality to sadness to love to lust to –

       You know it all, but still continue to read, to trace, to skim for nuances – flip through to any page and know the words by heart, but feel them strike the roof of your mouth differently when said aloud, each time.

       Kanaya interrupts your (recognizably somewhat saccharine) train of thought when she looks up with a wide-eyed, glassy expression – like a startled animal. You begin to ask what’s wrong, but are interrupted by her suddenly standing up with a hurried “Pardon me, for a moment,” walking to the sink, and unceremoniously vomiting up what sounds like about four full meals.

       You pause, your spoon loaded with oatmeal and halfway to your mouth, to ask, “You okay?”

       Kanaya turns toward you, slowly pivoting on one heel until the two of you are face to face. She has a thin line of vomit trailing from the corner of her mouth all the way down her chin, and she is… _smiling like a crazy person._

       “Rose.”

       “Kanaya?”

       “Rose. I’m pregnant.”

       You could absolutely contest this. You could happily list the statistics correlating to couples conceiving on the first try, you could even make the point that _throwing up in the morning does not equal morning sickness_ , but instead you don’t say anything. You take a long deep breath, and Kanaya smiles, and the little trail of vomit drips from her chin and on to the floor.

       “Do you think so?” You ask, not quite sure what to do with your face or hands.

       She nods, smile still threatening to crack her face open, and you can’t help but blurt out an objection or two, can’t stand to see her get her hopes up this way.

       “Kanaya, these things take time…the vomiting is, perhaps a good sign, but could just as easily be from last night’s Thai?” You pose it like a question, trying to curl the ends to soften all the hurt.

       She simply shakes her head. “No, Rose. I can feel it. I threw up. I never throw up. I’m. _Pregnant_.”

       And with that, you feel the grand decay of the bricks in the wall of your resolve. And you smile back. And you say _okay_. And you know you’ll say it over and over and over again until it’s true.

                                                                                       ***

       Kanaya, of course, wants to tell her family about the “good news.” You would like to mention something in regards to chickens and whether or not it is appropriate to commence counting them before their intended hatching date, but you – again – hold your tongue, aside from a few – you feel necessary – comments:

       “Kanaya, we don’t actually _know_ if you’re pregnant. We don’t want to get their hopes up, it’s not very likely that –“

       “Kanaya, I just _wonder_ if now is exactly the right time to let them know, it’d be easier to wait until we could take a real pregnancy –“

       “Kanaya, could you please just stop for one second, I don’t think it’s quite time to start knitting scarves for the –“

       Of course, all your protestations have fallen upon deaf, deaf ears.

       Which is how you end up in a Skype chat with three women speaking in very excited Farsi, while you try to keep the smile plastered to your face from chipping into something far more grotesque – perhaps a mask that implies you have no idea what you’re doing with your life.

       Kanaya’s older sister and mother live two states over, but she tries to keep in touch as often as humanly possible – filling your house, often, with her excited, unintelligible chatter.

       You sit back and watch Mrs. Maryam listen and listen and…you can absolutely tell when the good news hits because she covers her mouth with her hands and then begins clapping like an overenthusiastic sea-lion, with matching guttural noises to boot (you are unable to tell if these are actual words, or if the news of an impending baby has actually broken Kanaya’s mother.) Kanaya’s sister, Porrim, who you’ve never taken much of a shine to, eventually leans down to see the screen, clearly alerted by all the high-pitched gibberish. She is holding a bloody tissue by her nose, which she removes to show off a new, equally bloody, septum piercing. Lovely. Porrim and Kanaya speak together in a fragmented English/Farsi gangbang, and you can pick up on a few words, but not too many.

        _“Something Something Pregnant Something”_

        _“Something Blarghleargle been with a man? Something arblarblar.”_

_“No! No no no no no no no no somethingsomethinsomething no!”_

       Porrim crosses her arms and rolls her eyes at whatever this was, and you don’t particularly know what to do with yourself, so you try to stand up and let Kanaya have this conversation alone – it’s not as though you’re of much use. Unfortunately, as you work to make your surreptitious exit, Kanaya’s arm shoots out from her side and pulls you back down by your shirtsleeve. She says something quickly that must translate to “Everybody give Rose some unwanted attention,” because both Mrs. Maryam and Porrim turn to you and stare for a moment before saying hurried congratulations, Mrs. Maryam is warm, but Porrim’s attention seems already to have slid back to her profusely bleeding nose. Which, you suppose is…a fairly normal reaction when one’s orifices have been forcefully punctured. The conversation ends with blown kisses and well-wishes, and…you feel some part of you shift and shiver, a bit, at the thought that, if this baby is destined to exist, these women will be its family.

       Well. At least they’ll be the favorite side of the family.

                                                                                     ***

       At Kanaya’s great insistence, you call your mother. You consider just lying to her, pretending to be on the phone for an hour or so while actually catching up on some writing before your next deadline, but a) you would feel lousy about lying to your over-zealous girlfriend, and b) you’re afraid that Dirk will tell your mother before you do, which can end in nothing but tears and the threat of reduced inheritance. So, you fold your pride into a tiny box and shove it far, far down into your abdomen, where it pulses and protests lightly, but less than its normal dull roar upon any contact with your mom. You know exactly what the call will look like, can preemptively visualize it in its entirety. Your mother will pick up the phone, smooth French tips clicking against the rotary receiver (“ _It’s vintage, honey. I like the rotary; it makes me feel like a sweet little sixties housewife, popping Quaaludes and gossiping with my friend Edith about the neighbors_ ”), sitting in the lush, pink, crushed-velvet abomination of an armchair in her dark, overstuffed parlor. You know that you’ll be able to hear the clink of ice in her glass, and the slow exhale of smoke from her Eve as she tries, and fails, to angle it out the window, possibly the rumple of silk as she crosses and uncrosses her slip-clad legs, she doesn’t ever bother to get dressed on Sundays. (“ _Rosie, some people dress up for church, I dress down to make up for it. It’s the day of the Sabbath and Jesus made this lovely body, so I don’t see why I shouldn’t give him a little sneak peek on his special day. We really should have Christmas in our underwear, too, but I don’t for your sake, you little prune. Prude. I meant, prude. Ha – prune!_ ”) You clench your jaw, tap a song on your thighs, _oneandtwoandthreeandfour_ , and punch her number into your cell phone, propping your legs against your desk and packing it in for the long haul. Your mother picks up on the second ring, but clearly drops the receiver and you spend a good minute or so listening to her scrabble around muttering something like “ _Fucknuggetting Christshitting Cocklords_ ” before she picks up the phone with a too-loud “Helloooooooo, Lalonde residence!”

       “Hi, Mom,” You squeeze your eyes against an oncoming headache.

       “ _Rosie_! To what do I owe this _immense_ pleasure? I hardly ever hear from you, anymore, have to paddle out all my juicy gossip from your brother! And believe me, that one isn’t prone to chatting, either. How I raised such reticent children, I will never know. When are you coming over for brunch? I’d invite you to pop by now, but I’m hardly decent!”

       “Mom,” You cut her off with a clipped little sigh. “Mom. I can’t come to brunch, I was just calling with some news. Unless, of course, Dirk has already spoken to you…?” You trail off, kind of hoping that Dirk _has_ let the proverbial feline out of its receptacle. You can feel carbonated anxiety bubble high in your chest, a sticky coating laced up and down the lining of your throat.

       “Well, let’s think..the last thing Dirk told me about you that was of any interest to inquiring minds was that you adopted another kitty. And I’m going to make a biiig guess here, and say that you probably didn’t call me to christen your furry baby.”

       You actually, literally wince at the word baby. Well. That’s a reaction you’ll have to dissect. Sometime. In the future. Absolutely not now.

       “Well, Mom –“ You start, “I actually wanted to let you know that –“

       “Oh, Rose, I had the funniest thing happen to me the other day that I wanted to tell you about, Davey offered to pop by and check out the mouse situation that I have going on in the lab, and I swear, when he went down there we found about fifty of ‘em – maybe more. It was like The Rats of Nimh in there, I swear to _God_ , they’d started some kind of sentient colony and were plotting to have a little mouse sacrifice to their benevolent cheese-queen. That’s me, of course, the cheese queen. I know I shouldn’t feed them, but they’re awfully cute, I really couldn’t help mysel-“

       “ _Mother._ ” As riveting as you find The Grand Mouse Saga to be, you really just want to get this out and over with. “Sorry. Mom. I’m a little short on time, and I just wanted to tell you that –“

       “Oh, of course, of course, I’m sorry for interrupting, googlybear, please, continue. Don’t let me get in your way.”

       You try to sigh as quietly as possible, but know that your mom will pick up on the strain in your voice. “….Thank you. I just wanted to let you know that Kanaya and I are…Well, we’re. Um. You see, we’ve decided to –“

       “Oh, honeypeach, I really want to hear all about this, but the Cable Man just walked in and he’s got a lot of stubble and no wedding ring. Mama loves you, but mama also has to take care of herself, if you know what I mean. As long as you’re thinking that what I mean is that I’m going to seduce the cable man. Because that’s what I mean. Okay, okay, okay. Kisses! I’ll call you back, okay? Okay!”

       You listen to the rustle and bang as she tries to place the receiver back on to the base of the phone. You hang up first.

                                                                                 ***

       One week later, and Kanaya’s missed her period.

       Two weeks later and you’re outside the bathroom while she runs the faucet so you can’t listen to her peeing.

       Two weeks and three minutes later and you’re watching two pink lines show up on the pregnancy test.

       Two weeks, three minutes and thirty seconds later, and you have a lap full of Kanaya, kissing every available inch of you and crying soft, silent tears that drip down your neck and bleed into your collar.

       Two weeks, three minutes and thirty one seconds later, you realize that you’re fucked.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Captain Morgan and his band of rowdy pirates interrupt the story. A.K.A. The chapter in which Rose behaves badly.

_Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs_

_About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,_

_The night above the dingle starry,_

_Time let me hail and climb_

_Golden in the heydays of his eyes,_

_And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns_

_And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves_

_Trail with daisies and barley_

_Down the rivers of the windfall light._

-          Dylan Thomas, “Fern Hill”

 

The concrete is smooth against your face, it radiates a blessed warmth, gathered from a day’s worth of strong, oppressive sunshine. You find yourself filled with a narrow kind of intensity, lying here on the roof of Dirk and Dave’s apartment complex. You used to climb up here quite a lot as a teenager – Dave and you would shimmy up the fire escape to get away from your mother, your brother – to drink stolen Shiraz, and smoke cheap Swisher Sweets and eat Swedish Fish and feel messy and dumb – full of that sloppy, unformed, and boundless confidence that comes so easily with being fifteen. Your baby will be fifteen, one day. Will find roofs of his or her own to spit off of, will find jokes that make him or her laugh until wine snorts into her or his nasal cavities, and she or he tastes an undercurrent of alcohol and rot on his or her breath for weeks.

You told Kanaya that you were going to the store for a while – going to get milk – and you believed it, believed that you just needed a second to clear your head, create a physical distance between you and the idea of _having a child at twenty three,_ of having a living creature touch you and need you and fall asleep on your chest, and so you walked down three fluorescent aisles before the cheap, dirty siren song of Captain Morgan pulled you too strongly, through the check out and to the roof, so close to the silver shell of the sky, you shivered and smoked and it hurt, it _hurts_ , and you are just not ready but the train has left the station and you find yourself watching your life from far away. You’ve started to forget what it even looked like, before.

            You realize, suddenly, that your eyes are closed, and you pry them open – can feel the small contractions of your eyelids, are suddenly so aware of the rhythm of your breathing, the strangeness of your tongue – heavy and dry – lying fleshy and thick in your mouth. You can see so clearly every pebble in your vision, have focused on the imperfections in the ground. This is what drunkenness does for you, it focuses you to a tiny point – until you feel like the central ball of blackness inside a supernova. The one silent, pulsing thing in the middle of a rushing, uncaring world. Being drunk makes your mother loud, friendly – makes her swing her arms easily around shoulders and waists, grants her an extended capacity for closeness. Drunkenness just makes you absorb into yourself – collapse like a dying universe, you become concentrated and isolated to the point where you forget that anything else exists. Which, you suppose, is why this bout of binge drinking on your brothers’ roof is both immensely relieving and also terrifying.

            You figure it’d probably be good to get up, if for no other reason than to drink more – and it seems you left the bottle on the other side of the roof before deciding that you needed to be horizontal for a while. You push yourself up, and are suddenly very aware of the inertia carried out by each each of your movements, your limbs are slow and heavy and you know that you’re probably too drunk, but that’s not something that you really care about. It’s warm enough out here, and you have Captain Morgan and his merry band of Rummy Mates to keep you toasty all night long.

            _Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!_

            You can’t tell if you sang that out loud or not.

You make a move to stand, but, again, gravity works differently for you - as though you’re in a vacuum, or on the moon – and you stand only to immediately fall, again. You catch yourself clumsily with a hand and a shoulder, and you can feel gravel and dirt slide beneath the skin on your palm, and so you decide that maybe you should crawl from here. But crawling is hard when one of your hands is full of rocks and leaving bloody little constellations on the concrete. _Like, look there – it’s Orion._

You can’t tell if you said that out loud or not.

So you crawl with one hand and both your scraped knees, hobbling along like a three-legged dog to your destination, which you’ve labeled in your head simply as _The Rum_. You get to the Captain, give him a small salute, and take another long swig. Your body protests at this new development, as per usual, but you lock down the muscles in your stomach and dare it, just fucking dare it, to come back up. _I’m so drunk. I’m the drunkest person ever to drunk._

You can’t tell if you said that out loud.

You don’t realize that you’re humming Beethoven’s Fifth until, suddenly, Dave is with you and asking you why you’re humming Beethoven’s Fifth, which really is an excellent question that you absolutely don’t have the answer to. You try to look up at him, but he is dissolving in and out of focus and he seems too tall and too big and too bright, so instead you close your eyes and focus on the purple spots of light swimming against the thin skin of your eyelids – they look like little luminescent bruises.

Dave is saying something, but he sounds – to you – as though he’s underwater, or a very old song on the radio. You recognize the tone, but mostly it’s bright, noisy static and blurred syllables. You want to tell him to be quiet because there’s a baby sleeping, but then you realize that there’s no baby here and that wouldn’t make sense, so you just keep your eyes closed, and when he picks you up, you hold tight to the bottle of rum and allow your forehead to clatter tunelessly against his chest.

“The fuck are you _doing_ , Rose?” That one you can make out, because you can feel it and see it – it reverberates the hard bone of his sternum, and echoes against your cheekbone. He smells sweet – like sunshine and sweat and the strangeness of skin, and you don’t want to tell him what you’re doing, you want to tell him that you’re glad he hasn’t dropped you, because his arms seem very skinny.

Instead, you say “I’m not ready to be somebody’s mom.” And you don’t know where it came from, but the moment it comes out of your mouth, you can feel it soak through your body in a cold fucking rush, an icy ache building in your temples and spreading down your neck and into your chest.

He is quiet, or maybe he’s not quiet, you can’t tell what’s talking and what’s the clatter of his heartbeat, the short spurts of breath rattling through his lungs. You keep your face buried in his shirt, but can tell when he gets off the stairs, when he stops in front of the apartment door and kicks it three or four times, before Dirk’s inaudible voice rumbles from inside.

“I can not imagine why you can’t open the fucking door for yoursel-“

He stops and you try to turn your head to look at him, but only manage to bump Dave’s chest with your chin.

Suddenly, there is air beneath you, and then you’re in Dirk’s arms, a little sturdier than Dave’s, carrying you a little higher, so your face is in the sharp indent of his shoulder, and you’re wondering if they’re just going to spend the rest of the evening carrying you around the apartment like a sacrificial virgin.

“I’m not a sacrificial virgin” You say, and then curse yourself, because you meant to say _put me down_ , but you forgot how to use words, and all of a sudden you realize that you’re crying and Dirk’s shoulder is wet, and Dave – now standing next to you as Dirk sets you down on the kitchen island – has a big wet wound in his chest from, presumably, your tears.

They’re talking, fighting, maybe, their voices sound low but clipped, like the white flash of a dog’s teeth or the silence just after a slap.

“Rose,” Dirk is suddenly _all in your business_ , and you try to push him out of the way and _where the hell did your rum go?_ but your arms suddenly don’t feel like arms and, oops, you probably should have been listening, because Dirk looks exasperated and says another low thing to Dave above your head.

“I’m _fine_ , I just wanted to see the roof, again. I missed it. We’re _friends_.”

Dirk clucks like a big mother hen and bends down, again. “Open your mouth.”

“Why-“ You start to say, but he pops an Aspirin in and clamps your jaw shut like you’re a rabid dog before you can finish your sentence. In your confusion, you swallow it.

“Fuck you, stop trying to drug me, Dirk.” Again, you try to push him, but end up pushing Dave, who has an arm around your shoulders because Dirk told him he had to, so you wouldn’t choke on your own vomit.

“Where’s her phone? I want to let Kanaya know she’s okay.”

“No!” You try to stand up, to get off the stupid table, because Dirk can’t talk to Kanaya, can’t tell her that you’re afraid - but Dave’s arm is _too fucking heavy and you’re just so angry, your tears are coming hot and hard, now – and you’re swallowing most of them, because they’re pooling in your mouth along with hot, salty drool and everything is awful and you just want – you just want  - you just want it all to be_ over.

***

 

            You wake in a sticky pool of your own sweat and tears, eyelids almost sealed shut with a line of briny crust. After a minute, you recognize that you’re in Dave’s room – there are black and white photographs of birds and cigarette butts and, actually, one of you, clothes-pinned to a line across his window. The strong sun has faded them, and the picture of you is now half faceless, her left blurred by time and light – dissipating her into the unfocused background. Your face feels hot and itchy, and your body appears to just be one gigantic bruise. When you finally manage to actually sit up, you notice that your hand is bandaged –  rather liberally – and you feel a sharp slice of fondness for Dirk cut into you.

Oh God, Dirk. And Dave. Oh, fuck.

You know that the longer you wait, the more time they’ll have to look blank and impartial and not acknowledge your bad behavior, so you figure it’s best to get out and salt those wounds while they’re still worth something.

Dave’s asleep on the couch, an arm thrown haphazardly over his eyes and a hand halfway down his pants (he’s slept like this for as long as you can remember, and you no longer have any energy to be uncomfortable with it) as you quietly pick your way through the apartment – it’s funny how quickly you remember which detritus is where and how best to avoid it. _Sidestep the Smuppet pile here, the swords there, that fossilized piece of pizza over on this side…_ and you think you may actually be able to avoid everyone and send a retroactive Pesterchum apology. Or perhaps just completely ignore the issue, and hope they forget.

Unfortunately, as you scavenge the kitchen for your phone – that Dirk rudely pulled from your pocket, last night, to message Kanaya (to whom you probably should have cultivated some kind of excuse other than _I’m going to get milk_ , but we live and learn) – you turn away from the kitchen counter to find Dirk seated behind you at the table, eating Cheerios in _complete fucking silence._

You start a bit and he looks at you before returning to his cereal.

“Good morning. Thank you for letting me stay here, last night.” You adjust your skirt, and try to flatten out your hair, suddenly aware that you have not yet looked in a mirror and might be giving off a swamp monster vibe.

“You can’t do this anymore, Rose.”

You would like to make the case that it’s not as though this is a _common_ occurrence, and – while you can remember very little of last night, you’re about ninety eight percent sure that you did not hit anyone or vomit on anything of great value. Instead, you turn your head to look out the window and grit out a quiet ‘I apologize.’

Dirk doesn’t seem to take that very well. “I don’t need you to be sorry, Rose. I need you to not get wasted on my roof. I need you to be a fucking adult.”

It stings, but dimly. Dirk gives you the _being an adult_ talk on a somewhat regular basis, and you – the better woman - decline to mention his borderline obsession with horses and puppets, but usually scuff him off with a well placed eyebrow-raise. Today, you shrug – it’s a helpless gesture, but you know it will irritate him, and then perhaps he’ll just leave you the hell alone.

He looks at you for a long, long moment. There’s something in the set of his mouth and you can’t tell if it’s anger or regret or disappointment or maybe just flat-out sadness, but whatever it is lodges somewhere far inside of you and settles in for the long run.

            “Congratulations.” He says.  

You press your lips hard together, suddenly aware of the bloating tears inside of your throat. You nod at him, and he roots in his pocket to hand you another Aspirin and your phone. You want to hug him, but you don’t.

“I’m gonna go, okay?” You try to smile, but it only makes the hangover pressure in your head feel worse, so instead you grimace and hope it gets the point across.

“You should take a shower, first, or Kanaya’s going to think we enlisted you into a dog fighting ring.” Dirk smirks. “Also, wait for Dave to wake up so he knows that you’re not dead. Kid was pretty fucking upset, you know.”

“...Alright.” This is the best olive branch you’re going to get, so you take it.

You’ll take a shower, you’ll call Kanaya, you’ll go home.

You’ll survive.

           


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Rose considers James Joyce, autism, and waffles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Poetry from Michael Dickman's 'The Lives of My Friends', all other quoted text is from James Joyce's "Ulysses".

_What are the birds called_

_in that neighborhood_

_The dogs_

_There were dogs flying_

_from branch to_

_branch_

_My friends and I climbed up the telephone poles to sit on the power lines dressed like  
   crows_

_Their voices sounded like lemons_

_They were a smooth sheet_

_They grew_

_black feathers_

_Not frightening at all_

_but beautiful, shiny and_

_full of promise_

_What kind of light_

_is that?_

 

-          Michael Dickman, “From the Lives of My Friends”

 

 

When you return home, Kanaya is tucked in a kitchen chair, her long, golden toes curled around the edge of the tastefully upholstered seat. ( _No, Rose_ she’d said as you picked out furniture, _that color is too dark, I think. Lavender is much better, lavender with a print that is just barely there-_ )She’s curled around the book in her lap, something thick, pages stained yellow with age, you can’t see the cover, but if you crane your neck, you can see the faint blue notations on the page, the underlined sentences and small stars next to bracketed paragraphs. One of your books, then – Kanaya would die before touching the tip of a pencil to any piece of literature, but she says she likes reading your marked-up books. She says it’s like a treasure hunt taking place inside your mind – _why was this starred, but that was underlined? Why did you turn down this page, but didn’t mark anything?_ She says she likes to figure most of it out on her own, but has been known to wake you at two or three in the morning with hot, feverish breath on your ear, asking questions like – _I can’t sleep, why did you only underline Juliet’s dialogue?_

To which you replied. _I was playing Juliet. Those were my lines._ And buried your face in her neck and laughed, seemingly, until you woke and it was light.

Today, though, she’s reading something far heftier than _Romeo and Juliet_ , and she keeps her head tilted toward it, even though you know she can hear you shuffling off your shoes in the entryway. You’re afraid that if you speak first, a hot geyser of apologies and half-formed lies will slop out of your mouth, so instead you gnaw the inside of your cheek, and loiter in the doorway, watching Kanaya read, he finger trailing lightly across the feathery edges of the pages, you eventually walk to stand behind her, rest your chin on her shoulder and read. She does not react to the touch, which you think is promising – at least she didn’t flinch away, tense her muscles and click her jaw, the way she does when she’s working on a hard piece of the crossword, or ready to say that she’s given up trying to understand you. If you follow the line of her eyes, you can see that she’s reading a passage you’ve demarcated with two small stars:

 

“Her antiquity in preceding and surviving succeeding tellurian generations: her nocturnal predominance: her satellitic dependence: her luminary reflection: her constancy under all her phases, rising and setting by her appointed times, waxing and waning: the forced invariability of her aspect: her indeterminate response to inaffirmative interrogation: her potency over effluent and refluent waters: her power to enamour, to mortify, to invest with beauty, to render insane, to incite to and aid delinquency: the tranquil inscrutability of her visage: the terribility of her isolated dominant resplendent propinquity: her omens of tempest and of calm: the stimulation of her light, her motion and her presence: the admonition of her craters, her arid seas, her silence: her splendour, when visible: her attraction, when invisible.”

 

You remember well the moment you stumbled into that passage, and finding it deeply, alarmingly serendipitous, surrounded it with (now almost embarrassingly little-girlish) stars. You’d come home from your third date with Kanaya, you’d kissed her again and again in your car, little pecks, nips, tentative graceful warmth spreading from her thin fingers, resting lightly on your collarbone. Your hair, your clothing, your mouth, all smelled thickly like her perfume and, underneath, the dusky scent of her skin and saliva. You’d picked up _Ulysses_ , figuring James Joyce would at least help you fall asleep, and tripped lazily through a few random pages before settling on this discussion of the moon. The moon has always been an apt descriptor of femininity, you know, but you found yourself picturing Kanaya as you read – the eerie almost-luminescence of her the passenger seat, backlit by a streetlight, dripping waxy yellow over her shoulders and across her high cheekbones. And it was so _true,_ Kanaya was omens of tempest and calm, tranquilly inscrutable, possibly an aide of delinquency…you read the passage aloud to yourself, relishing the shape of words in your mouth, until you fell asleep.

She finishes the section, and closes the book, leaving one finger pressed against the spine to keep her place. She does not look up at you, but she does press her temple against yours, and you turn to kiss her, hoping that this will be enough, that you won’t have to explain.

"She is quiet for a moment, before opening _Ulysses_ , again, and flipping toward the front.

“What does this one mean?” About halfway down the page, someone has highlighted, in bright orange, one sentence:

 

“The sea, the snotgreen sea, the scrotumtightening sea.”

 

“That one,” you say, almost quirking a smile, “Means I’m never lending Dirk one of my books ever, ever again.”

“How is he?” She asks, setting the book on the table and looking conspicuously not-at-you.

“He’s fine. He just needed me to come over, last night. Dave had a…bit of an existential crisis. I’m sorry I didn’t call.” You make your way across the kitchen to start tea. She hasn’t made any, yet. It’s your job.

You’re turned away from her, but you can hear the smile in her voice when she says. “It’s alright. You’re a good sister. Oh, and could you make me the Jasmine Green this morning, please? No more caffeine, remember?” She pats her stomach.

You clench the handle of the teapot very tightly, for a moment, allowing your fingernails to dig sharp crescent moons into your palm. _You’re a good sister, no caffeine, it’s alright, it’s alright –_

“Of course.” You pull out a new teabag, and swallow a large lump of air to keep down whatever self-depreciating, truthful thing you were going to say.

She stands, then, and wraps her arms around your waist and you want to bite your hands and sob, but you also want to kiss her because she is your luminous constant, and she’s trying so hard to pull you into her orbit and…eventually you give up and turn in her arms, kissing her hard – all tongue and teeth and spicy toothpaste breath – and this is a modicum of okay that you can allow into your life, right now.

***

Later, after the breakfast dishes have been cleared and a familiar calm has settled around your house, again, Kanaya wanders upstairs and returns a minute or two later holding her laptop. You know this can only mean one thing, as Kanaya usually works exclusively in the upstairs office (which will be converted to the baby’s room – although the two of you have not yet entirely breached that subject). It means the beginning of a strange, strange ritual. It means that Sollux is coming over.

You can not entirely comprehend Kanaya’s relationship with Sollux – he visits maybe once every month, one of the only friends she made in college - aside, of course, from you.  He and Kanaya have a routine that you’ve never actually heard them speak of, but seems to be fairly set-in-stone. As far as you can tell, all that happens is that he comes over with a six pack of Sprite, sets it on the coffee table, aligned neatly between himself and Kanaya on the couch, then they both open their laptops and work separately, in silence. Drinking the Sprite. When the Sprite is finished, he departs. And – you assume – the same thing happens when Kanaya goes over to his place with a six pack of Dr. Pepper.

You told your mother about this, once, when you were at her house and a little puffed up on scotch-courage, and she shrugged and said “Parallel Play, Rosie. It’s a thing autistic kids do; I looked it up when I was worried about you, because you wouldn’t talk until you were five.”

You rolled your eyes, at the time, but went home and Googled late into the night, shoving fistfuls of Doritos into your gaping mouth, and squinting your eyes against the harsh blue glare of different “ _Autism Test for YOUR Child!_ ” websites. You don’t think Kanaya is _very_ autistic, but she shows…almost _every single sign_ of Asperger’s. And she likes hanging out with weird, skinny Sollux who consistently ignores you, and…if that’s the case, so be it.

He arrives at exactly 10:30 AM, and Kanaya beings to studiously ignore you, and so you take this as your cue to depart. You shoot them both a cheery little salute from their spot on  the couch as you leave with your laptop bag slung over your shoulder – they nod back at you in tandem and you’re just a little bit more than somewhat weirded out.

The good thing about Kanaya being occupied is that you get a chance to work on your book without any buzzing talk of _babies_ in the background. You hit up your favorite old haunt – The Waffle House just off the interstate, where Dave used to wait tables, and you wrote about 85% of your first novel. Dave introduced you to John – who worked in the kitchen, and would always slip you free coffee and sometimes bacon, and occasionally you’d read him some of the gorier portions of your book, judging his reaction. Your thinking was that if someone who worked the night shift at the _Waffle House_ was disgusted, you may have gone a little too far.

When you show up, you’re greeted by a totally empty restaurant, save John, sitting in a back booth and balancing a straw on his nose. When you clear your throat, he jumps and the straw falls of his nose, ricochets off the table and smacks off the bridge of his glasses. You suppress a giggle as he looks up at you and grins _enormously_ , standing and then walk-jogging toward you with his arms open. “Hey, you!” He laughs, “The hell you been, dude?”

After you obligingly return his over-enthusiastic hug, he slings an arm around your shoulders and calls “Karkaaaat, c’mon out, we got a special customer here, today.” You roll your eyes, mumbling something about _just wanting to get some work done_ , and he shushes you by clapping a big, calloused palm over your mouth.

“Don’t you protest. I haven’t seen you in _months_. Hey – how’s Dave doing? He said he’d call me up, last night, but he never did…” He trails off and you feel a slick of guilt coat the lining of your throat.

“Oh, yeah…I actually abducted him last night. I had to…tell him some news.” You instantly regret every decision you’ve ever made in your life that helped to lead to that fucking statement. You are _so_ not in the mood to tell John Egbert about your expected infant, but based on the way that he gestures frantically toward a booth and slides in across from you, resting his head on his chin like a character from a fucking romantic comedy, you know that is _exactly_ what you’re going to do.

Before John is able to pester you into submission, a surly guy, short but dense with both muscles and – it would seem – rage, sidles up by your table and gives John a long, pointed look before slapping a menu down in front of you. “What do you want to drink?” He sighs, clicking his pen with far more force than is probably necessary.

“Um. Coffee’s fine, thank you.”

“Some for me, too, thanks, Karkat.” John grins up at him, chin still pillowed in hands, and you can suddenly trace one, large vein bulge down the side of Karkat’s face.

As he turns to obtain the coffee pot, John yells after him “And bring cream!” Before looking back at you and grinning. “He’s not that bad of a guy, I just like fucking with him.”

You tilt a smile toward him, and make to pull out your laptop, hoping that maybe you can de-rail the conversation now, and he’ll just forget about the aforementioned news.

No dice. The next words out of his mouth are, “So, what’s this news of yours? Gettin’ married? Gettin’ divorced? Pregnant with the son of God?”

You fold your hands on the table and wait a moment before responding, “The tertiary option, although I am fairly certain that the father is not God.”

John crumples his eyebrows for a second before squirting out a confused little chuckle and asking “…Seriously?”

“Well..” You pause, trying to figure out the best way to say this. You’re tempted to just blast it all out there and see if he can handle it, as you did with some sections of your book a year or so ago, but you change your mind mid-sentence. “Yes and no. My long-time partner, Kanaya, is pregnant. We decided that we…wanted a baby. So, we asked Dave to be a donor, and she’s tested positive, so. Tada.” You make half-hearted spirit fingers, trying to convey…something to him. Enthusiasm, maybe?

“ _Shit_ , Rose.” He looks at you for a long, long moment, not breaking eye contact, before getting up to _bolt_ into the kitchen. You half-stand to follow him, but realize that it’s probably best to stay seated with all your limbs firmly within the confines of your seating area.

John returns no longer than five minutes later, decked out in a makeshift napkin party-hat, holding a stack of waffles covered in a giant heap of whipped cream, a lit candle precariously perched atop it, flame wobbling with his every step. He’s pulling Karkat behind him, also clad in a jaunty napkin-hat, but considerably less enthused about the situation. He walks toward you, singing a jaunty rendition of “Happy Birthday” where the word “Birthday” has been replaced with “Pregnancy.”

He stops in front of your table and sets down Waffle Mountain, you blow out the candle at the final chorus of _Happy pregnancy to yooooooooooooooooooou!_

Then, against all of your better judgment, you give him your first real smile in days.

 


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> There's nudity. There are tiny scissors. There is talk of The Notebook.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU ALWAYS to my beta, MistCover, without whom this chapter would not exist. (She coined the phrase "I'm naked and holding tiny scissors." Albeit in a far different context.) 
> 
> Poetry is from Emily Dickinson's "One Sister Have I in our House" 
> 
> P.S. Sorry for the big delay between chapters. Life occasionally happens to me, and then I have to sleep it off.

_Today is far from Childhood –_

_But up and down the hills_

_I held her hand the tighter –_

_Which shortened all the miles –_

_And still her hum_

_The years among,_

_Deceives the Butterfly;_

_Still in her Eye_

_The Violets lie_

_Mouldered this many May._

 

-          Emily Dickinson, “One Sister Have I in our House”

Everyone in the Strider-Lalonde family (barring, of course, the two absent father-figures, about whom you would rather not speak) has been witness to, or partaken in, an IKEA related meltdown at least once in their lives. The first occurred in early November, nineteen seventy seven, when, according to poorly-documented, but oft-recounted family history, your mother - heavily pregnant with an enthusiastic Dirk (who, at the time, according to the gospel of Roxy Lalonde, was performing some sort of inter-uterine Jazzercise routine – further indication of his future sexual orientation), a bead of sweat trickling, determined, from her neck and into her distended bosom – screamed obscenities, full force, at a changing table that refused to stand at anything other than a jaunty twenty degree angle. 

The second instance, from what you can gather, occurred in the year two thousand. Dirk, upon moving in with now-former, then-current, always-incredibly-strange boyfriend Jake English came to the shocking, uncomfortable realization that his former system of two-twin-beds-bungee-corded-together-on-the-floor was not entirely conducive to romance. Allegedly, when Jake insisted on a _real_ bed frame – and after three hours, two phone calls, seven stubbed toes, various insults regarding 1) stamina, 2) manhood, and 3) shapeliness of buttocks, and an incident that (from the various retellings you have been privy to) may have involved unsolicited biting and/or unwilling cross-dressing, it became apparent that it wasn’t going to work.

The third meltdown darkened the Strider doorstep on a freezing afternoon in early two thousand and six, two or three weeks after Dave arrived at Dirk’s apartment, hair dripping with sleet, nose running, and fireman-carrying a duffle bag containing all his earthly possessions, after he’d stormed out of your mother’s house. The shattered remains of what could have been a perfectly ergonomic nightstand lay in four separate pieces strewn across Dirk’s bedroom, haphazardly scarred and disfigured like a small-pox victim by the herculean strife sparked during assembly. For a long, long time after, a Post-it note on the fridge read, in sparkly vermillion gel-pen, _INSERT TAB ‘A’ INTO SLOT ‘B’ BITCH_.

You spent every day for the next seven years waking assured that you conquered the curse. That, as your mother has oft prophesied, the IKEA meltdowns have naught to do with an old, one-eyed gypsy woman’s curse, and more to do with the weak-will and unrelenting temper of your entire immediate family (save you, the only sane person ever to spring forth from the loins of Roxy Lalonde). In fact, Kanaya and you assembled many a trendy, art-deco-reminiscent-piece of Swedish furnishing in blissful compliance, the only issue ever _resembling_ an argument was one minor tiff involving the placement of a package of miniature screws – screws that were soon located beneath the disproportionately wide rump of someone who shall remain nameless. Said person was apologized to, said rump was quickly groped, and business resumed as usual.

Which is why you are rather surprised to wake, ten weeks into Kanaya’s pregnancy, to hear a high, almost inhuman keening from the adjacent room – the room (in your opinion prematurely) dedicated to the baby. The guest room/Kanaya’s home office (she’s worked for a PR firm since exiting college, and likes to bring her work home with her – so as not to leave the cats alone for too long) was once a cool, soft sage color, furnished with rich, dark wood and delicate, sea-foam bed hangings. You loved that room, liked to nap there, sometimes, in the afternoon – close your eyes and see a blur of sun-dazzled green and blue smeared across the pale canvas of your eyelids. The room is now gutted, bed broken into pieces and shuffled into attic storage, eight or nine colors smear one wall, and at least twenty-six separate, dissonant paint strips line the others. You bought a crib, a changing table, a rocking chair – all of which require assembly, but you’ve left in the boxes, for now. Every time you walk by the room, you feel something twitch from your calves all the way up into your nose – like you walked through a cobweb or a patch of fog or perhaps a malevolent ghost.

Today, though, you roll unceremoniously out of bed – dragging most of the sheet along with you, tangling your feet until you trip and have to catch yourself on the edge of the bedside table, sliding the lamp precariously close to the border before saving it with the corner of your forehead.

You disentangle with slightly more caution.

You walk-run to the baby’s room, body still lazy and sleep-warm, mind not quite solidified,  so much so that you think – as you run – you can actually hear your addled brain slosh around within your skull, frightened, half-awake sentiments fluttering in and out of your range of consciousness. _Kanaya’s hurt or dying she had a miscarriage we won’t have a baby we will have an empty half-painted room and –_

You stand in the doorway for a long, long moment.

Kanaya is in the far corner of the room, trapped by a verifiable supernova of crib pieces. She is sitting, cross-legged on the floor, and sobbing uncontrollably. In one hand, she holds the IKEA directions. In the other hand, a pair of recently acquired child-safety-scissors.

It is also important, you think, to note that she is completely naked but for a towel turban and her now-ubiquitous shower socks.

You hover, testing the parameters of your reality. Rarely do you have dreams where you are this lucid, but  equally rarely do you have a sobbing, naked, pregnant girlfriend soaking the IKEA crib instructions with a combination of shower water and uncontainable tears.

“Sweetheart…” You venture, cautiously. Clearly, you missed the course on _Ways to Handle Unreasonable Early Morning Emotions in Combination With Unexpected Nakedness_. “Is everything..alright?”

Kanaya looks up at you, eyes glassy and dilated, tears and snot streaming freely and excitedly down her face, and does not even deign to reply to your (admittedly) needless question.

So, naturally, you figure the next logical step is to pose _another_ redundant query “Did you decide to, um, put the crib together.”

Kanaya stares at you for a long, long moment, before replying in a low, measured voice that you have come to associate – over the years – with her mounting hysteria. “…Rose. I decided to surprise you. I decided I would assemble the baby’s room before you woke up. I got out of the shower, and I didn’t want to wake you because you looked so peaceful, so I came in here, and I took everything out of the box, and there are just _so many pieces_.”

You open your mouth, trying to compose something comforting and thoughtful, but she continues before your words have time to take shape.

“And the directions don’t make any sense, and I’ve been sitting here trying to read them, but they are _functionally out of order_ , and I thought I’d just cut them up and rearrange them, but we don’t have _any pairs of scissors in this house_ , so I looked and looked for scissors and I found these, but they are _terrible at being scissors_ , and I just wanted to do _one_ nice thing for you and the baby and I completely failed and now I am _naked and holding tiny scissors_ and I _hate_ Sweden, and I _hate_ this crib and now you think I’m a _crazy person._ ”

And then there is more sobbing.

You have done a fair amount of reading, as you are prone to do, and you have learned that within the first trimester and beyond, there are hormone spikes. You thought you saw the extent of said hormone spikes when you found Kanaya crying and watching _The Notebook_ in the middle of the night, a few days ago. You thought, perhaps, that this was the course her pregnancy ( _OUR_ pregnancy, as she likes to call it, much to your chagrin), there would be crying, and there would be poor movie choices, and you would put on your kind, thoughtful girlfriend face, and you would kiss her and help her back to bed when she fell asleep on the couch so she wouldn’t get a cramps in her neck.

You were unaware that there would be so much tiny-scissor-related angst.

You slowly, carefully sidestep the crib detritus, and kneel beside Kanaya, now heaving sobs into the carpet, and you rest a gentle hand on her back, stroking symmetrical patters _onetwothreefour onetwothreefour,_ over and between the jutting tines of her spine, and her sobbing does not still, but it quiets, until you two are shrouded in a thick early morning silence – something just slightly off the center of pleasant, and the light streams from the large window over your neck and her back and it is warm and things could be okay.

“You want to have this baby, don’t you?” She asks, after hawking up a mouthful of mucus and saliva. She looks up at you with a filmy, tearstained face – traces of fear and hope shining just beneath her skin, fitting her with an ethereal glow.

You pause, for a moment, taking in all of her – her soft skin and her slightly uneven nipples and her wide eyes, tilted just a bit at the top, and the faint trace of a baby-bulge that she runs her hand over, idly, when she thinks no one is watching.

“Yes,” You say, quietly.

And you mean it.


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Part one of The Fourth of July Debacle. Enjoy.

_maggie and milly and molly and may_

_went down to the beach(to play one day)_

_and maggie discovered a shell that sang_

_so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and_

_milly befriended a stranded star_

_whose rays five languid fingers were;_

_and molly was chased by a horrible thing_

_which raced sideways while blowing bubbles:and_

_may came home with a smooth round stone_

_as small as a world and as large as alone._

_For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)_

_it's always ourselves we find in the sea_

 

-          e.e. cummings, “maggie and milly and molly and may”

 

 

You do not look forward to any part of today. Not your mother’s charred, mostly unidentifiable meat products. Nor the unadulterated, and – quite frankly – almost profane, saccharine, chirpiness that will radiate from all of her well-fucking-moisturized pores - dripping in sunny globules from every inch of her, threading through her hair like the salty veins of ocean water – the water that will invariably dry everyone’s hair to an unpalatable straw-like texture, bleaching bone-white strands in a map all across your irritated scalp. Least of all are you looking forward to the invariable, inevitable sunburn that will thicken the skin on your back to a solid, flaking plane of searing-red pain.

You abhor the Fourth of July. No amount of unbridled patriotism can stave off your hatred. It runs deep.

Every year within your living memory (and, from certain photographic evidence, prior to that) you’ve been woken at the ass-crack of dawn, unceremoniously lugged into your mother’s beloved maroon station wagon, where you sit in the back bench seat squeezed between a sweaty, over-heated Dave – skin still warm and gritty from his bed, reeking of sleepy boy – and a gigantic, liberally dented hot pink cooler, filled to explosion-point with hot dogs, potato-salad, and whatever other weird shit your mother feels will be useful in celebrating this monumental excuse to get drunk. Ahem, you mean _holiday_.

Your mother, Dirk, Dave, and you make the hour and a half drive to Montauk every single year to sit uncomfortably on the beach, fill every single one of your orifices with sand, watch the reflection of the fireworks bleed across the water, and then go home silent and sun burnt, each of you wincing as the car hits a bump in the road, causing the rough grain of the seats to rub against your respective charred patches of skin.

You almost convinced yourself that this year would be different. That some angel would look down upon you, spread open her benevolent arms, and call down “ _There shall be no hot dogs in your future, oh child of God._ ” Or at least you could claim that Kanaya was too pregnant to be left alone while you cavorted off to sand-in-cooch-land.

But no dice.

Your (totally justified) insistence that you wanted to spend the fourth with your pregnant girlfriend left your mother silent on the other end of the phone for exactly four seconds. Four seconds where you could imagine a quiet, relaxed fourth with Kanaya – perhaps the two of you would lie in the bath with candles, or cuddle and watch television, or maybe you could finally have sex again, because she just stopped throwing up every twenty three seconds.

Instead, your mother says “Oh, Rosie, I was _expecting_ you to bring Kanaya! There’s room in the car, y’know, we’ll just pop somebody into the front bench seat, no problemo. See ya at five! We gotta start out early, this time – I don’t want the beach to be all filled up by the time we get there! Buhbye, cutie pie.”

And then she hangs up.

_Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuugh._

Kanaya, on the other hand, is fairly excited about the prospect. You find her sitting on the kitchen floor, eating straight from a jar chunky of peanut butter and re-reading _Pride and Prejudice_.

When you tell her, she speaks through goopy peanut-butter-mouth, smiling. “That sounds nice, Rose. I want to get closer to your family...for the baby, you know?”

Kanaya’s had some…minor issues with your brothers, in the past. As someone who judges emotion by what she can interpret from facial expressions, Dave and Dirk have proved a bit of a challenge for Kanaya, what with their mutual reluctance to consistently move their faces. This means that she’s had to latch on to whatever interpretable stimulus they _do_ put out, often with strange consequences.

For example, Kanaya has trouble knowing when Dirk is joking, but is good enough at reading his body language, that she can eerily accurately predict whether or not he is too hot or too cold.

Which is how you end up jammed in your mother’s station wagon in the early-morning purple-dark, squashed directly behind Kanaya, who is squashed in the front between Dirk (who took over driving up to the beach the second he acquired a license, smart man) and your mother – doing eighty down the interstate, while Kanaya ceaselessly fiddles with the air conditioning dials, because temperature-related interactions are the _only interactions she knows how to have with your brother_.

“Are you feeling cold, Dirk?” She asks politely, and it takes every single ounce of your willpower not to facepalm for eternity.

“Uh...” Dirk’s eyebrows furrow just slightly above his sunglasses, “Yeah, kinda, actually.”

He reaches out to flip the AC down, but Kanaya very gently pushes his hand away, with a jovial, “I’ve got it. Not to worry.”

Dave coughs out a little chuckle next to you, and you kick him in the shin.

“ _Ow_ , that was an important part of me, Rose! Jesus. Mom. Mom. Hey Mom –“

“What is it, Davey?”

“Rose kicked me.”

“Oh for _Gods_ sake you are a grown man –“

“Rose, don’t kick your brother.”

“Rose, feel _free_ to kick your brother.”

“Dirk, don’t undermine my parenting!”

“Mom, I think you’ve already done that job well enough yourself.”

And then there is silence.

And silence.

And silence.

Until Kanaya asks:

“Pardon me, Dirk? I don’t mean to be a nuisance, but are you at all hot?”

 

The beach is, as anticipated, hot and itchy and unpleasant. You caught an awfully nice sunrise on your way up, thick colors lathered over the water as you drove up the coastline, but it went mostly unnoticed between the passive-aggressive bickering and the conspicuous noise of Dave and Kanaya (who you have secretly, affectionately, started calling the Hungry, Hungry Hippo in your head) eating _all_ the chips from the cooler.

Upon exiting the car, you pop on your sunglasses, an unfortunate but necessary fashion statement, today. Everyone but Kanaya is be-shaded at the beach, your eyes are all too sensitive to the glare coming off the water, the hot ripples of light fractured all across the sand. The first order of business is Herculean removal of cooler, to be performed by Dave and Mostly Dirk – then, it’s time for your mother to remove the two or sometimes three bottles of SPF 100 from her purse and insist, noisily, that everyone needs to apply or else face the wrath of skin cancer and wee skin flakes all over your bed for a month. Even Kanaya borrows some sunscreen - though she only darkens in the sun - because she doesn’t want anything to harm the baby. You get her back. She rubs in a splotch on your nose and smiles.

The day progresses lazily, you brought a bathing suit – a forties-style black one-piece, but opt to stay out of the ocean, keeping your little black mesh cover over top of it – which still doesn’t deter Kanaya from plying you with a white, viscous ocean of sunscreen every twenty odd minutes. Perhaps you complained a little too heartily about burning.

Kanaya also refrains from swimming, instead talking excitedly with your mother about her first ultra-sound – hastily pulling pictures out of her purse to put on display. Your mom coos, as is expected, and the two of them talk about baby-length or something for longer than you care to pay attention. Kanaya dusts the sand off the photos before placing them back, reverently, in the little plastic sectional of her wallet.

You try to read your book but find approximately four things to be distracting:

1)      Your mother. She spends a good hour or so sidled right up against you, her warm, lightly peach-fuzzed arm skimming against yours as she asks innumerable, unanswerable questions – such as _Oh sweetie pie, have you thought of names? Do you know that Dirk wanted to name you Eloise? Eloise! God, how did I ever_ not _think he was gay…Oh, and is Kanaya taking her [insert long string of vitamins that you frankly do not know nor do you care about] and also, ALSO…I forgot what I was going to say. Pass me the margarita mix, will you, lamb chop?_

2)      Dave and Dirk. Despite all your conditioning from childhood, it is hard for you not to look up when you hear a yelp and then a series of frustrated gurgles. They’re strifing in the ocean with pool noodles. They have almost symmetrical scars weaving between the freckles up their respective arms, across their backs. Although Dirk has a silver, shiny burn right on the hard plane of his inner arm. From his father. The Mr. Strider you never met. You wave, periodically, but try not to encourage such behavior too much.

3)      Kanaya’s vacuum-cleaner tendencies as she orbits around the cooler, like a moth stuck in a fluorescent. First, you look up and she’s eating all the carrots by dipping them in the potato salad. Then, she’s got a hot dog and is slicing it finely into the rest of said aforementioned potato-substance. _Then_ , she pulls a small, salvaged bag of chips _from her bikini bra_ , and crumbles those into the horrible Fraken-casserole she’s created. She eats primly with a fork, and when she catches you staring, she offers a carrot. When you refuse, it too goes into the salad.

4)      Kanaya, again. Particularly a matter of her hand, later in the afternoon. Her hand, and how it slides slowly, slowly up your inner thigh as your mom naps _right next to you_ and your brothers try to drown each other roughly twenty feet away. Kanaya leans closer to you, and her breath smells kind of like potato salad but also kind of inherently warmly and spicily of _her_ , and you lean in for one feverish kiss, and her hand is _serious_ about reaching its destination and….

It’s going to be a long day.


	10. An Explanation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Just like the title says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I figured abandoning this fic without any explanation was a pretty crappy thing to do - although getting everyone's hopes up about a new update might be equally crappy. Eh, regardless, I'll try to make this explanation as entertaining as possible - and maybe give you a bit of an idea of what would have happened to this fic had I not left it alone in a poorly lit bus station bathroom with a note pinned to its little duck-themed jumper saying "Sorry, folks. Life happened."

_As true as truth need be, when all is said:_   
_That if you find no truth among the living_   
_You will not find much truth among the dead._   
_No other time but now, no other place than here, he said._   
_He drew the shawl about him as he spoke,_   
_And dozed in his arm-chair till the morning broke._

-          T.S. Eliot, “Oh Little Voices of the Throats of Men”

 

I’ll try to keep this brief.

In  January of 2012, I sat – shivering and shirtless, a run in my tights slowly snaking its way up my inner thigh – in the corner of a dark, mostly unfurnished room, stuck in those manic, dry-mouthed early morning hours at the tail end of a house party.

I remember first trying to bite through the soft skin at the juncture between my armpit and upper breast - attempting to draw blood – still stuck in some kind of furious ecstasyandxanax fever, my pulse snapping a staccato beat all through my body.

At some point, I must have given up. Next I remember, I stood on the balcony with Someone I kindofwantedtokissandbekissedby, curling into myself, smoking a cigarette and cutting my eyes downward through the heavy curtain of my bleached bangs.

This has little to do with fictional lesbians, I’m aware. I’m giving out the background information in order to provide some context. Shortly after that cold-bleached morning in my underwear on the balcony, I got some help. I went through a rehabilitation program. I came out alive.

Cut to April, I began to feel progressively more and more isolated from my former crowd of friends – our lives fractured in vastly different patterns, and I stopped talking to most of them. The Someone I wanted to kissandtouchand _oh_ was hooked on a pipe and then a needle. We cried together, once-twice-three-times, and then lost touch.

Around that time, I discovered Homestuck. On 4/13, to be precise. Thanks, internet. It was such a blissful refuge for me – this endlessly, sometimes needlessly, complex piece of serial fiction – characters with the same neuroses I saw in myself, an endless platform for conjecture and world development and _escape_. I loved it. I read all the way through to the beginning of Act 6 in just under two weeks. I befriended the characters and I allowed their stories to sing me to sleep for months after I caught up with the comic.

Fast forward farther, this time, to January of 2013. By this time, I was almost completely clean – but for a voracious addiction to cheap cigarettes, not only because nicotine is addictive, but so is routine and, worse, self-image – and I’d made a crop of new acquaintances. We drank a lot of coffee. We talked often of Camus. We were, frankly, unbearable. I closely monitored the Homestuck updates, but didn’t mention my growing obsession with the comic to anyone.

            I met my Beta in January, during a production of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_. We went to see a movie. I casually mentioned Homestuck. She made some kind of high-pitched excitable squirrel noise. _The Kingdom_ became our brainchild. We spent months developing the AU, driving aimlessly in and out of town, eating a lot of ice cream. I coated the inside of her car with the thick smell of cigarettes and my sticky rosemusk perfume. I still feel bad about that. _Kingdom_ was an excellent escape, a joy to discover, and a greater joy to write. It also yanked me forcefully from an almost year-long dry spell, writing-wise. My long abandoned novel had atrophied to a brutally edited drunken rant by the time I began _Kingdom_. It was a grand fresh start.

            I began to drop off updating around the middle of the summer – July stretched into an endless, star-freckled map of popsicle-breath and cherry Chapstick, I acquired three new scars when I jumped from a cliff into a reservoir. I climbed up and over an abandoned train car in flip flops, my toes blackened with soot and gravel dust and age as I drank sweet wine from a hip flask wedged into my too-tight shorts. My limbs darkened and my hair grew. My skin began to taste like salt water and sunshine. _Kingdom_ started to feel more like a chore than a freedom.

            My Beta and I experienced some difficulties around the end of August, upon which I won’t elaborate, as I wouldn’t want to embarrass or expose her in any way she wouldn’t appreciate. She’s a good person, and I hope she’s happy. We are no longer in contact.

            This severance obviously didn’t help me find any new reserves of inspiration to update. I picked at _Kingdom_ periodically, but eventually found my attention diverted to other projects. Comics to write, stories to tell, cardboard cutouts of Joe Biden to purchase, etc.

            Also. I fell in love. My Someone (now a year sober) and I bumped into each other - quite literally, I had the bruise to prove it - in a trendy all-night-coffee-shop/potential-cult (that place is another story for another day) and rekindled the thing that kept us together through all the salt-stained sweaters and bruised knees. I’ve grown my hair even longer. My Someone has more freckles, now. We are very happy.

            Anyway. All of this conspired to skid my fic to a screeching halt. And I’m sorry to everyone so invested in and supportive of this endeavor. If you’re interested, this was always going to have a happy ending. Some details:

 

  1. Kanaya and Rose anticipated always that their baby would be a girl, but – lo – they instead ended up with a  boy, who they named Theo. He’s born healthy and slightly late – weighing in around 8 pounds.
  2. Dirk and Dave are excellent uncles – although Kanaya has an aneurysm about allowing Theo in their apartment. “No child safety locks!” “Sharp objects well within reach!” “Doritos _everywhere_!”
  3. I had a truly fabulous idea for a deeply awkward Christmas scene – involving Braxton Hicks contractions, hostile conversation, and more talk of Kanaya’s nipples from Dave. _Damnit Dave._
  4. Also, Roxy and Mrs. Maryam meet, greet and…agree, on relatively good terms, that they’ll never understand each other.
  5. And Dirk hates Porrim. And Porrim hates Dirk. And Hilarity ensues.
  6. Jade was going to show up, too. And it was going to be quite awkward, as she’d previously slept with Rose. Kanaya was going to get crazy jealous hackles and they’d only be more pronounced because of the whole SuperPreggers situation. I didn’t just throw Jade in the character tags for shits and giggles, I promise.
  7. I guess what really matters is that everyone ends up happy. Blissful, even.



 

Thanks for putting up with the long explanation. I hope it was at least informative, if not actually worth reading. If you have any questions, or would be interested in reading more of my non-fanfic writing, or want to write an angry tirade that’s too long to fit in the Ao3 comments section, hit me up. I’m horsecocksandkneesocks.tumblr.com.

Thank you for sticking around.

Be well.

_And then sprang up a little damp dead breeze_   
_That rattled at the window while he slept,_   
_And had those been human voices in the chimneys_   
_And at the shutters, and along the stair,_   
_You had not known whether they laughed or wept._

 


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